No More Learning

"
In brief, this is to say that Arnold took little interest in human
nature; nor is there anything in his later essays on Byron, Keats,
Wordsworth, Milton, or Gray, to cause us to revise the judgment on
this point. In fact, so far as he touched on the personality of Keats
or Gray, to take the capital instances, he was most unsatisfactory.
Arnold was not, then, one of those critics who are interested in
life itself, and through the literary work seize on the soul of the
author in its original brightness, or set forth the life-stains in the
successive incarnations of his heart and mind. Nor was he of those
who consider the work itself final, and endeavor simply to under-
stand it,-form and matter,—and so to mediate between genius and
our slower intelligence. He followed neither the psychological nor
the æsthetic method. It need hardly be said that he was born too
early to be able ever to conceive of literature as a phenomenon of
society, and its great men as only terms in an evolutionary series.
He had only a moderate knowledge of literature, and his stock of
ideas was small; his manner of speech was hard and dry, there was
a trick in his style, and his self-repetition is tiresome.


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848
MATTHEW ARNOLD
What gave him vogue, then, and what still keeps his more liter-
ary work alive? Is it anything more than the temper in which he
worked, and the spirit which he evoked in the reader ? He stood
for the very spirit of intelligence in his time. He made his readers
respect ideas, and want to have as many as possible. He enveloped
them in an atmosphere of mental curiosity and alertness, and put
them in contact with novel and attractive themes. In particular, he
took their minds to the Continent and made them feel that they
were becoming cosmopolitan by knowing Joubert; or at home, he
rallied them in opposition to the dullness of the period, to "bar-
barism" or other objectionable traits in the social classes: and he
volleyed contempt upon the common multitudinous foe in general,
and from time to time cheered them with some delectable examples
of single combat. It cannot be concealed that there was much mali-
cious pleasure in it all. He was not indisposed to high-bred cruelty.
Like Lamb, he "loved a fool," but it was in a mortar; and pleasant
it was to see the spectacle when he really took a man in hand for
the chastisement of irony. It is thus that "the seraphim illuminati
sneer. " And in all his controversial writing there was a brilliancy
and unsparingness that will appeal to the deepest instincts of a
fighting race, willy-nilly; and as one had only to read the words to
feel himself among the children of light, so that our withers were
unwrung, there was high enjoyment.
This liveliness of intellectual conflict, together with the sense of
ideas, was a boon to youth especially; and the academic air in which
the thought and style always moved, with scholarly self-possession
and assurance, with the dogmatism of "enlightenment" in all ages
and among all sects, with serenity and security unassailable, from
within at least—this academic ❝clearness and purity without shadow
or stain" had an overpowering charm to the college-bred and culti-
vated, who found the rare combination of information, taste, and
aggressiveness in one of their own ilk. Above all, there was the play
of intelligence on every page; there was an application of ideas to
life in many regions of the world's interests; there was contact with
a mind keen, clear, and firm, armed for controversy or persuasion
equally, and filled with eager belief in itself, its ways, and its will.
To meet such personality in a book was a bracing experience;
and for many these essays were an awakening of the mind itself. We
may go to others for the greater part of what criticism can give, —
for definite and fundamental principles, for adequate characterization,
for the intuition and the revelation, the penetrant flash of thought
and phrase: but Arnold generates and supports a temper of mind in
which the work of these writers best thrives even in its own sphere;
and through him this temper becomes less individual than social,


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MATTHEW ARNOLD
849
encompassing the whole of life. Few critics have been really less
"disinterested," few have kept their eyes less steadily "upon the
object" but that fact does not lessen the value of his precepts of
disinterestedness and objectivity; nor is it necessary, in becoming "a
child of light," to join in spirit the unhappy "remnant" of the acad-
emy, or to drink too deep of that honeyed satisfaction, with which he
fills his readers, of being on his side. As a critic, Arnold succeeds if
his main purpose does not fail, and that was to reinforce the party
of ideas, of culture, of the children of light; to impart, not moral
vigor, but openness and reasonableness of mind; and to arouse and
arm the intellectual in contradistinction to the other energies of civ-
ilization.
The poetry of Arnold, to pass to the second portion of his work,
was less widely welcomed than his prose, and made its way very
slowly; but it now seems the most important and permanent part.
It is not small in quantity, though his unproductiveness in later years
has made it appear that he was less fluent and abundant in verse
than he really was. The remarkable thing, as one turns to his
poems, is the contrast in spirit that they afford to the essays: there
is here an atmosphere of entire calm. We seem to be in a different
world. This fact, with the singular silence of his familiar letters in
regard to his verse, indicates that his poetic life was truly a thing
apart.
In one respect only is there something in common between his
prose and verse: just as interest in human nature was absent in the
latter, it is absent also in the former. There is no action in the
poems; neither is there character for its own sake. Arnold was a
man of the mind, and he betrays no interest in personality except
for its intellectual traits; in Clough as in Obermann, it is the life
of thought, not the human being, that he portrays. As a poet, he
expresses the moods of the meditative spirit in view of nature and
our mortal existence; and he represents life, not lyrically by its
changeful moments, nor tragically by its conflict in great characters,
but philosophically by a self-contained and unvarying monologue,
deeper or less deep in feeling and with cadences of tone, but always
with the same grave and serious effect. He is constantly thinking,
whatever his subject or his mood; his attitude is intellectual, his
sentiments are maxims, his conclusions are advisory. His world is
the sphere of thought, and his poems have the distance and repose
and also the coldness that befit that sphere; and the character of his
imagination, which lays hold of form and reason, makes natural to
him the classical style.
It is obvious that the sources of his poetical culture are Greek.
It is not merely, however, that he takes for his early subjects Merope
11-54


## p. 850 (#272) ############################################

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MATTHEW ARNOLD
and Empedocles, or that he strives in 'Balder Dead' for Homeric
narrative, or that in the recitative to which he was addicted he
evoked an immelodious phantom of Greek choruses; nor is it the
"marmoreal air” that chills while it ennobles much of his finest
work. One feels the Greek quality not as a source but as a presence.
In Tennyson, Keats, and Shelley, there was Greek influence, but
in them the result was modern. In Arnold the antiquity remains;
remains in mood, just as in Landor it remains in form. The Greek
twilight broods over all his poetry. It is pagan in philosophic spirit;
not Attic, but of a later and stoical time, with the very virtues of
patience, endurance, suffering, not in their Christian types, but as
they now seem to a post-Christian imagination looking back to the
imperial past. There is a difference, it is true, in Arnold's expres-
sion of the mood: he is as little Sophoclean as he is Homeric, as little
Lucretian as he is Vergilian. The temperament is not the same,
not a survival or a revival of the antique, but original and living.
And yet the mood of the verse is felt at once to be a reincarnation
of the deathless spirit of Hellas, that in other ages also has made
beautiful and solemn for a time the shadowed places of the Christian
world. If one does not realize this, he must miss the secret of the
tranquillity, the chill, the grave austerity, as well as the philosoph-
ical resignation, which are essential to the verse. Even in those
parts of the poems which use romantic motives, one reason of their
original charm is that they suggest how the Greek imagination would
have dealt with the forsaken merman, the church of Brou, and Tris-
tram and Iseult. The presence of such motives, such mythology,
and such Christian and chivalric color in the work of Arnold does
not disturb the imple unity of its feeling, which finds no solvent for
life, whatever its accident of time and place and faith, except in
that Greek spirit which ruled in thoughtful men before the triumph.
of Christianity, and is still native in men who accept the intellect as
the sole guide of life.
It was with reference to these modern men and the movement
they took part in, that he made his serious claim to greatness; to
rank, that is, with Tennyson and Browning, as he said, in the litera-
ture of his time. "My poems," he wrote, "represent on the whole
the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century; and
thus they will probably have their day as people become conscious
to themselves of what that movement of mind is, and interested in
the literary productions that reflect it. It might be fairly urged that
I have less poetical sentiment than Tennyson, and less intellectual
vigor and abundance than Browning; yet because I have, perhaps,
more of a fusion of the two than either of them, and have more
regularly applied that fusion to the main line of modern development,


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MATTHEW ARNOLD
851
If
I am likely enough to have my turn, as they have had theirs. "
the main movement had been such as he thought of it, or if it had
been of importance in the long run, there might be a sounder basis
for this hope than now appears to be the case; but there can be no
doubt, let the contemporary movement have been what it may, that
Arnold's mood is one that will not pass out of men's hearts to-day
nor to-morrow.
On the modern side the example of Wordsworth was most form-
ative, and in fact it is common to describe Arnold as a Wordsworthian.
and so, in his contemplative attitude to nature, and in his habitual
recourse to her, he was; but both nature herself as she appeared to
him, and his mood in her presence, were very different from Words-
worth's conception and emotion. Arnold finds in nature a refuge
from life, an anodyne, an escape; but Wordsworth, in going into the
hills for poetical communion, passed from a less to a fuller and
deeper life, and obtained an inspiration, and was seeking the goal of
all his being. In the method of approach, too, as well as in the
character of the experience, there was a profound difference between
the two poets. Arnold sees with the outward rather than the inward
eye. He is pictorial in a way that Wordsworth seldom is; he uses
detail much more, and gives a group or a scene with the externality
of a painter. The method resembles that of Tennyson rather than
that of Wordsworth, and has more direct analogy with the Greek
manner than with the modern and emotional schools; it is objective,
often minute, and always carefully composed, in the artistic sense of
that term. The description of the river Oxus, for example, though
faintly charged with suggested and allegoric meaning, is a noble close
to the poem which ends in it. The scale is large, and Arnold was
fond of a broad landscape, of mountains, and prospects over the land;
but one cannot fancy Wordsworth writing it. So too, on a small
scale, the charming scene of the English garden in Thyrsis' is far
from Wordsworth's manner:—
-
"When garden walks and all the grassy floor
With blossoms red and white of fallen May
And chestnut-flowers are strewn -
So have I heard the cuckoo's parting cry,
From the wet field, through the vext garden trees,
Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze. »
This is a picture that could be framed: how different from Words-
worth's "wandering voice"! Or to take another notable example,
which, like the Oxus passage, is a fine close in the Tristram and
Iseult,' the hunter on the arras above the dead lovers :-


## p. 852 (#274) ############################################

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MATTHEW ARNOLD
"A stately huntsman, clad in green,
And round him a fresh forest scene.
On that clear forest-knoll he stays,
With his pack round him, and delays.
The wild boar rustles in his lair,
The fierce hounds snuff the tainted air,
But lord and hounds keep rooted there.
Cheer, cheer thy dogs into the brake,
O hunter! and without a fear
Thy golden tasseled bugle blow->
But no one is deceived, and the hunter does not move from the
arras, but is still "rooted there," with his green suit and his golden
tassel. The piece is pictorial, and highly wrought for pictorial effects
only, obviously decorative and used as stage scenery precisely in the
manner of our later theatrical art, with that accent of forethought
which turns the beautiful into the æsthetic. This is a method which
Wordsworth never used. Take one of his pictures, the 'Reaper' for
example, and see the difference. The one is out-of-doors, the other
is of the studio. The purpose of these illustrations is to show that
Arnold's nature-pictures are not only consciously artistic, with an ar-
rangement that approaches artifice, but that he is interested through
his eye primarily and not through his emotions. It is characteris-
tic of his temperament also that he reminds one most often of the
painter in water-colors.
If there is this difference between Arnold and Wordsworth in
method, a greater difference in spirit is to be anticipated. It is a
fixed gulf. In nature Wordsworth found the one spirit's "plastic
stress," and a near and intimate revelation to the soul of truths that
were his greatest joy and support in existence. Arnold finds there no
inhabitancy of God, no such streaming forth of wisdom and beauty
from the fountain heads of being; but the secret frame of nature is
filled only with the darkness, the melancholy, the waiting endurance
that is projected from himself:-
"Yet, Fausta, the mute turf we tread,
The solemn hills about us spread,
The stream that falls incessantly,
The strange-scrawled rocks, the lonely sky,
If I might lend their life a voice,
Seem to bear rather than rejoice. »
Compare this with Wordsworth's 'Stanzas on Peele Castle,' and the
important reservations that must be borne in mind in describing
Arnold as a Wordsworthian will become clearer. It is as a relief from


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MATTHEW ARNOLD
853
1.
thought, as a beautiful and half-physical diversion, as a scale of being
so vast and mysterious as to reduce the pettiness of human life to
nothingness, it is in these ways that nature has value in Arnold's
verse. Such a poet may describe natural scenes well, and obtain by
means of them contrast to human conditions, and decorative beauty;
but he does not penetrate nature or interpret what her significance is
in the human spirit, as the more emotional poets have done. He
ends in an antithesis, not in a synthesis, and both nature and man
lose by the divorce. One looks in vain for anything deeper than
landscapes in Arnold's treatment of nature; she is emptied of her
own infinite, and has become spiritually void: and in the simple great
line in which he gave the sea
"The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea- >>
he is thinking of man, not of the ocean: and the mood seems ancient
rather than modern, the feeling of a Greek, just as the sound of the
waves to him is always Ægean.
In treating of man's life, which must be the main thing in any
poet's work, Arnold is either very austere or very pessimistic. If the
feeling is moral, the predominant impression is of austerity; if it is
intellectual, the predominant impression is of sadness. He was not in-
sensible to the charm of life, but he feels it in his senses only to deny
it in his mind. The illustrative passage is from 'Dover Beach':—
"Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain. »
This is the contradiction of sense and thought, the voice of a
regret grounded in the intellect (for if it were vital and grounded in
the emotions it would become despair); the creed of illusion and
futility in life, which is the characteristic note of Arnold, and the
reason of his acceptance by many minds. The one thing about life
which he most insists on is its isolation, its individuality. In the
series called 'Switzerland,' this is the substance of the whole; and
the doctrine is stated with an intensity and power, with an amplitude
and prolongation, that set these poems apart as the most remarkable
of all his lyrics. From a poet so deeply impressed with this aspect
of existence, and unable to find its remedy or its counterpart in the
harmony of life, no joyful or hopeful word can be expected, and none
is found. The second thing about life which he dwells on is its
futility; though he bids one strive and work, and points to the
example of the strong whom he has known, yet one feels that his


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MATTHEW ARNOLD
voice rings more true when he writes of Obermann than in any
other of the elegiac poems. In such verse as the 'Summer Night,'
again, the genuineness of the mood is indubitable. In The Sick
King of Bokhara,' the one dramatic expression of his genius, futility
is the very centre of the action. The fact that so much of his
poetry seems to take its motive from the subsidence of Christian
faith has set him among the skeptic or agnostic poets, and the "main
movement" which he believed he had expressed was doubtless that
in which agnosticism was a leading element. The unbelief of the
third quarter of the century was certainly a controlling influence over
him, and in a man mainly intellectual by nature it could not well
have been otherwise.
Hence, as one looks at his more philosophical and lyrical poems-
the profounder part of his work — and endeavors to determine their
character and sources alike, it is plain to see that in the old phrase,
"the pride of the intellect" lifts its lonely column over the desola-
tion of every page. The man of the academy is here, as in the
prose, after all.
He reveals himself in the literary motive, the
bookish atmosphere of the verse, in its vocabulary, its elegance of
structure, its precise phrase and its curious allusions (involving foot-
notes), and in fact, throughout all its form and structure. So self-
conscious is it that it becomes frankly prosaic at inconvenient times,
and is more often on the level of eloquent and graceful rhetoric than
of poetry. It is frequently liquid and melodious, but there is no
burst of native song in it anywhere. It is the work of a true poet,
nevertheless; but there are many voices for the Muse. It is sincere,
it is touched with reality; it is the mirror of a phase of life in our
times, and not in our times only, but whenever the intellect seeks
expression for its sense of the limitation of its own career, and its
sadness in a world which it cannot solve.
A word should be added concerning the personality of Arnold
which is revealed in his familiar letters,- a collection that has
dignified the records of literature with a singularly noble memory of
private life. Few who did not know Arnold could have been pre-
pared for the revelation of a nature so true, so amiable, so dutiful.
In every relation of private life he is shown to have been a man of
exceptional constancy and plainness. The letters are mainly home
letters; but a few friendships also yielded up their hoard, and thus
the circle of private life is made complete. Every one must take
delight in the mental association with Arnold in the scenes of his
existence, thus daily exposed, and in his family affections. A nature
warm to its own, kindly to all, cheerful, fond of sport and fun, and
always fed from pure fountains, and with it a character so founded
upon the rock, so humbly serviceable, so continuing in power and


## p. 855 (#277) ############################################

MATTHEW ARNOLD
855
grace, must wake in all the responses of happy appreciation, and
leave the charm of memory.
He did his duty as naturally as if it required neither resolve, nor
effort, nor thought of any kind for the morrow, and he never failed,
seemingly, in act or word of sympathy, in little or great things; and
when, to this, one adds the clear ether of the intellectual life where
he habitually moved in his own life apart, and the humanity of his
home, the gift that these letters bring may be appreciated. That gift
is the man himself; but set in the atmosphere of home, with son-
ship and fatherhood, sisters and brothers, with the bereavements of
years fully accomplished, and those of babyhood and boyhood, -a
sweet and wholesome English home, with all the cloud and sunshine
of the English world drifting over its roof-tree, and the soil of Eng-
land beneath its stones, and English duties for the breath of its being.
To add such a home to the household-rights of English literature is
perhaps something from. which Arnold would have shrunk, but it
endears his memory.
Kryer combong
3
INTELLIGENCE AND GENIUS
From Essays in Criticism'
IAT are the essential characteristics of the spirit of our
nation ? Not, certainly, an open and clear mind, not a
quick and flexible intelligence. Our greatest admirers
would not claim for us that we have these in a pre-eminent
degree; they might say that we had more of them than our de-
tractors gave us credit for, but they would not assert them to
be our essential characteristics. They would rather allege, as
our chief spiritual characteristics, energy and honesty; and if we
are judged favorably and positively, not invidiously and nega-
tively, our chief characteristics are no doubt these: energy and
honesty, not an open and clear mind, not a quick and flexible
intelligence. Openness of mind and flexibility of intelligence
were very signal characteristics of the Athenian people in an-
cient times; everybody will feel that. Openness of mind and


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MATTHEW ARNOLD
flexibility of intelligence are remarkable characteristics of the
French people in modern times, at any rate, they strikingly
characterize them as compared with us; I think everybody, or
almost everybody, will feel that. I will not now ask what more
the Athenian or the French spirit has than this, nor what short-
comings either of them may have as a set-off against this; all
I want now to point out is that they have this, and that we
have it in a much lesser degree.
Let me remark, however, that not only in the moral sphere,
but also in the intellectual and spiritual sphere, energy and
honesty are most important and fruitful qualities; that for in-
stance, of what we call genius, energy is the most essential
part.
So, by assigning to a nation energy and honesty as its
chief spiritual characteristics,- by refusing to it, as at all emi-
nent characteristics, openness of mind and flexibility of intelli-
gence, we do not by any means, as some people might at first
suppose, relegate its importance and its power of manifesting
itself with effect from the intellectual to the moral sphere. We
only indicate its probable special line of successful activity in
the intellectual sphere, and, it is true, certain imperfections
and failings to which in this sphere it will always be subject.
Genius is mainly an affair of energy, and poetry is mainly an
affair of genius; therefore a nation whose spirit is characterized
by energy may well be eminent in poetry;-and we have Shake-
speare. Again, the highest reach of science is, one may say,
an inventive power, a faculty of divination, akin to the highest
power exercised in poetry; therefore a nation whose spirit is
characterized by energy may well be eminent in science;—and
we have Newton. Shakespeare and Newton: in the intellectual
sphere there can be no higher names. And what that energy,
which is the life of genius, above everything demands and
insists upon, is freedom; entire independence of all authority,
prescription, and routine,-the fullest room to expand as it will.
Therefore a nation whose chief spiritual characteristic is energy
will not be very apt to set up, in intellectual matters, a fixed
standard, an authority, like an academy. By this it certainly
escapes certain real inconveniences and dangers; and it can at
the same time, as we have seen, reach undeniably splendid
heights in poetry and science.
On the other hand, some of the requisites of intellectual work
are specially the affair of quickness of mind and flexibility of
―――


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MATTHEW ARNOLD
857
intelligence. The form, the method of evolution, the precision,
the proportions, the relations of the parts to the whole, in an
intellectual work, depend mainly upon them. And these are the
elements of an intellectual work which are really most commu-
nicable from it, which can most be learned and adopted from it,
which have therefore the greatest effect upon the intellectual
performance of others. Even in poetry these requisites are very
important; and the poetry of a nation not eminent for the gifts
on which they depend, will more or less suffer by this shortcom-
ing. In poetry, however, they are after all secondary, and energy
is the first thing; but in prose they are of first-rate importance.
In its prose literature, therefore, and in the routine of intellectual
work generally, a nation with no particular gifts for these will
not be so successful. These are what, as I have said, can to a
certain degree be learned and appropriated, while the free activ-
ity of genius cannot. Academies consecrate and maintain them,
and therefore a nation with an eminent turn for them naturally
establishes academies. So far as routine and authority tend to
embarrass energy and inventive genius, academies may be said to
be obstructive to energy and inventive genius, and to this extent
to the human spirit's general advance. But then this evil is so
much compensated by the propagation, on a large scale, of the
mental aptitudes and demands which an open mind and a flexible
intelligence naturally engender, genius itself in the long run so
greatly finds its account in this propagation, and bodies like the
French Academy have such power for promoting it, that the
general advance of the human spirit is perhaps, on the whole,
rather furthered than impeded by their existence.
How much greater is our nation in poetry than prose! how
much better, in general, do the productions of its spirit show in
the qualities of genius than in the qualities of intelligence! One
may constantly remark this in the work of individuals: how much
more striking, in general, does any Englishman-of some vigor
of mind, but by no means a poet-seem in his verse than in his
prose! His verse partly suffers from his not being really a poet,
partly no doubt from the very same defects which impair his
prose, and he cannot express himself with thorough success in it,
but how much more powerful a personage does he appear in it,
by dint of feeling and of originality and movement of ideas, than
when he is writing prose! With a Frenchman of like stamp, it is
just the reverse: set him to write poetry, he is limited, artificial,


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MATTHEW ARNOLD
and impotent; set him to write prose, he is free, natural, and
effective. The power of French literature is in its prose writers,
the power of English literature is in its poets. Nay, many of
the celebrated French poets depend wholly for their fame upon
the qualities of intelligence which they exhibit,- qualities which
are the distinctive support of prose; many of the celebrated
English prose writers depend wholly for their fame upon the
qualities of genius and imagination which they exhibit,- qualities
which are the distinctive support of poetry.
But as I have said, the qualities of genius are less transferable
than the qualities of intelligence; less can be immediately learned
and appropriated from their product; they are less direct and
stringent intellectual agencies, though they may be more beau-
tiful and divine. Shakespeare and our great Elizabethan group
were certainly more gifted writers than Corneille and his group;
but what was the sequel to this great literature, this literature of
genius, as we may call it, stretching from Marlowe to Milton?
What did it lead up to in English literature? To our provincial
and second-rate literature of the eighteenth century. What, on
the other hand, was the sequel to the literature of the French
"great century," to this literature of intelligence, as by compar-
ison with our Elizabethan literature we may call it; what did it
lead up to? To the French literature of the eighteenth century,
one of the most powerful and pervasive intellectual agencies that
have ever existed, the greatest European force of the eighteenth
century. In science, again, we had Newton, a genius of the
very highest order, a type of genius in science if ever there was
one. On the continent, as a sort of counterpart to Newton,
there was Leibnitz; a man, it seems to me (though on these
matters I speak under correction), of much less creative energy
of genius, much less power of divination than Newton, but rather
a man of admirable intelligence, a type of intelligence in science
if ever there was one. Well, and what did they each directly
lead up to in science? What was the intellectual generation that
sprang from each of them? I only repeat what the men of
science have themselves pointed out. The man of genius was
continued by the English analysts of the eighteenth century,
comparatively powerless and obscure followers of the renowned
master. The man of intelligence was continued by successors
like Bernoulli, Euler, Lagrange, and Laplace, the greatest names
in modern mathematics.
-


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859
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT
From 'Culture and Anarchy'
HE disparagers of culture make its motive curiosity; some-
make its motive mere exclusiveness and
vanity. The culture which is supposed to plume itself on
a smattering of Greek and Latin is a culture which is begotten
by nothing so intellectual as curiosity; it is valued either out of
sheer vanity and ignorance, or else as an engine of social and
class distinction, separating its holder, like a badge or title, from
other people who have not got it. No serious man would call
this culture, or attach any value to it, as culture, at all. To
find the real ground for the very differing estimate which serious
people will set upon culture, we must find some motive for cult-
ure in the terms of which may lie a real ambiguity; and such a
motive the word curiosity gives us.
ment was.
I have before now pointed out that we English do not, like the
foreigners, use this word in a good sense as well as in a bad sense.
With us the word is always used in a somewhat disapproving
sense. A liberal and intelligent eagerness about the things of
the mind may be meant by a foreigner when he speaks of curi-
osity; but with us the word always conveys a certain notion of
frivolous and unedifying activity. In the Quarterly Review, some
little time ago, was an estimate of the celebrated French critic,
M. Sainte-Beuve; and a very inadequate estimate it in my judg-
And its inadequacy consisted chiefly in this: that in
our English way it left out of sight the double sense really in-
volved in the word curiosity, thinking enough was said to stamp
M. Sainte-Beuve with blame if it was said that he was impelled
in his operations as a critic by curiosity, and omitting either to
perceive that M. Sainte-Beuve himself, and many other people
with him, would consider that this was praiseworthy and not
blameworthy, or to point out why it ought really to be accounted
worthy of blame and not of praise. For as there is a curiosity
about intellectual matters which is futile, and merely a disease,
so there is certainly a curiosity—a desire after the things of the
mind simply for their own sakes and for the pleasure of seeing
them as they are-which is, in an intelligent being, natural
and laudable. Nay, and the very desire to see things as they
are implies a balance and regulation of mind which is not often


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860
MATTHEW ARNOLD
attained without fruitful effort, and which is the very opposite of
the blind and diseased impulse of mind which is what we mean
to blame when we blame curiosity. Montesquieu says:-"The
first motive which ought to impel us to study is the desire to
augment the excellence of our nature, and to render an intelli-
gent being yet more intelligent. " This is the true ground to
assign for the genuine scientific passion, however manifested, and
for culture, viewed simply as a fruit of this passion; and it is a
worthy ground, even though we let the term curiosity stand to
describe it.
But there is of culture another view, in which not solely the
scientific passion, the sheer desire to see things as they are,
natural and proper in an intelligent being, appears as the ground
of it. There is a view in which all the love of our neighbor, the
impulses toward action, help, and beneficence, the desire for
removing human error, clearing human confusion, and diminish-
ing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better
and happier than we found it,-motives eminently such as are
called social,-come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the
main and pre-eminent part. Culture is then properly described
not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in
the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. It moves by
the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for
pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for
doing good. As in the first view of it we took for its worthy
motto Montesquieu's words, "To render an intelligent being yet
more intelligent! " so in the second view of it there is no better
motto which it can have than these words of Bishop Wilson: "To
make reason and the will of God prevail. "
Only, whereas the passion for doing good is apt to be over-
hasty in determining what reason and the will of God say, be-
cause its turn is for acting rather than thinking, and it wants to
be beginning to act; and whereas it is apt to take its own con-
ceptions, which proceed from its own state of development and
share in all the imperfections and immaturities of this, for a
basis of action: what distinguishes culture is, that it is possessed
by the scientific passion as well as by the passion of doing good;
that it demands worthy notions of reason and the will of God,
and does not readily suffer its own crude conceptions to substi-
tute themselves for them. And knowing that no action or insti-
tution can be salutary and stable which is not based on reason
.


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861 (#283) ############################################

MATTHEW ARNOLD
861
and the will of God, it is not so bent on acting and instituting,
even with the great aim of diminishing human error and misery
ever before its thoughts, but that it can remember that acting
and instituting are of little use, unless we know how and what
we ought to act and to institute.
The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness
and light. He who works for sweetness and light, works to
make reason and the will of God prevail. He who works for
machinery, he who works for hatred, works only for confusion.
Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture
has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light. It
has one even yet greater! -the passion for making them prevail.
It is not satisfied till we all come to a perfect man; it knows
that the sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect until
the raw and unkindled masses of humanity are touched with
sweetness and light. If I have not shrunk from saying that we
must work for sweetness and light, so neither have I shrunk
from saying that we must have a broad basis, must have sweet-
ness and light for as many as possible. Again and again I
have insisted how those are the happy moments of humanity,
how those are the marking epochs of a people's life, how those
are the flowering times for literature and art and all the creative
power of genius, when there is a national glow of life and
thought, when the whole of society is in the fullest measure
permeated by thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive.
Only it must be real thought and real beauty; real sweetness
and real light. Plenty of people will try to give the masses, as
they call them, an intellectual food prepared and adapted in the
way they think proper for the actual condition of the masses.
The ordinary popular literature is an example of this way of
working on the masses. Plenty of people will try to indoctrin-
ate the masses with the set of ideas and judgments constituting
the creed of their own profession or party. Our religious and
political organizations give an example of this way of working on
the masses. I condemn neither way; but culture works differ-
ently. It does not try to teach down to the level of inferior
classes; it does not try to win them for this or that sect of its
own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords. It seeks to
do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought
and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men
live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may


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MATTHEW ARNOLD
use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely,- nourished and not
bound by them.
This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true
apostles of equality. The great men of culture are those who
have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying
from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best
ideas of their time; who have labored to divest knowledge of all
that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive;
to humanize it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cul-
tivated and learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and
thought of the time, and a true source, therefore, of sweetness
and light. Such a man was Abélard in the Middle Ages, in spite
of all his imperfections; and thence the boundless emotion and
enthusiasm which Abélard excited. Such were Lessing and
Herder in Germany, at the end of the last century; and their
services to Germany were in this way inestimably precious. Gen-
erations will pass, and literary monuments will accumulate, and
works far more perfect than the works of Lessing and Herder
will be produced in Germany; and yet the names of these two
men will fill a German with a reverence and enthusiasm such as
the names of the most gifted masters will hardly awaken. And
why? Because they humanized knowledge; because they broad-
ened the basis of life and intelligence; because they worked
powerfully to diffuse sweetness and light, to make reason and the
will of God prevail. With Saint Augustine they said:- "Let us
not leave thee alone to make in the secret of thy knowledge, as
thou didst before the creation of the firmament, the division of
light from darkness; let the children of thy spirit, placed in their
firmament, make their light shine upon the earth, mark the divis
ion of night and day, and announce the revolution of the times;
for the old order is passed, and the new arises; the night is
spent, the day is come forth; and thou shalt crown the year with
thy blessing, when thou shalt send forth laborers into thy harvest
sown by other hands than theirs; when thou shalt send forth new
laborers to new seed-times, whereof the harvest shall be not yet. "
Keeping this in view, I have in my own mind often indulged
myself with the fancy of employing, in order to designate our
aristocratic class, the name of The Barbarians. The Barbarians,
to whom we all owe so much, and who reinvigorated and renewed
our worn-out Europe, had, as is well known, eminent merits;
and in this country, where we are for the most part sprung from


## p. 863 (#285) ############################################

MATTHEW ARNOLD
863
the Barbarians, we have never had the prejudice against them.
which prevails among the races of Latin origin. The Barbarians
brought with them that stanch individualism, as the modern
phrase is, and that passion for doing as one likes, for the asser-
tion of personal liberty, which appears to Mr. Bright the central
idea of English life, and of which we have at any rate a very
rich supply. The stronghold and natural seat of this passion
was in the nobles of whom our aristocratic class are the inherit-
ors; and this class, accordingly, have signally manifested it, and
have done much by their example to recommend it to the body
of the nation, who already, indeed, had it in their blood. The
Barbarians, again, had the passion for field-sports; and they have
handed it on to our aristocratic class, who of this passion, too,
as of the passion for asserting one's personal liberty, are the
great natural stronghold. The care of the Barbarians for the
body, and for all manly exercises; the vigor, good looks, and
fine complexion which they acquired and perpetuated in their
families by these means,- all this may be observed still in our
aristocratic class. The chivalry of the Barbarians, with its char-
acteristics of high spirit, choice manners, and distinguished bear-
ing,-what is this but the attractive commencement of the
politeness of our aristocratic class? In some Barbarian noble,
no doubt, one would have admired, if one could have been then
alive to see it, the rudiments of our politest peer. Only, all this
culture (to call it by that name) of the Barbarians was an exte-
rior culture mainly. It consisted principally in outward gifts and
graces, in looks, manners, accomplishments, prowess. The chief
inward gifts which had part in it were the most exterior, so to
speak, of inward gifts, those which come nearest to outward ones;
they were courage, a high spirit, self-confidence. Far within,
and unawakened, lay a whole range of powers of thought and
feeling, to which these interesting productions of nature had,
from the circumstances of their life, no access. Making allow-
ances for the difference of the times, surely we can observe
precisely the same thing now in our aristocratic class. In general
its culture is exterior chiefly; all the exterior graces and accom-
plishments, and the more external of the inward virtues, seem
to be principally its portion. It now, of course, cannot but be
often in contact with those studies by which, from the world of
thought and feeling, true culture teaches us to fetch sweetness
and light; but its hold upon these very studies appears remarkably
-


## p. 864 (#286) ############################################

864
MATTHEW ARNOLD
external, and unable to exert any deep power upon its spirit.
Therefore the one insufficiency which we noted in the perfect
mean of this class was an insufficiency of light.
And owing
to the same causes, does not a subtle criticism lead us to make,
even on the good looks and politeness of our aristocratic class,
and of even the most fascinating half of that class, the fem-
inine half, the one qualifying remark, that in these charming
gifts there should perhaps be, for ideal perfection, a shade more
soul?
I often, therefore, when I want to distinguish clearly the
aristocratic class from the Philistines proper, or middle class,
name the former, in my own mind, The Barbarians. And when
I go through the country, and see this and that beautiful and
imposing seat of theirs crowning the landscape, "There," I say
to myself, "is a great fortified post of the Barbarians. "
OXFORD
From Essays in Criticism'
N°
WE are all seekers still! seekers often make mistakes, and
I wish mine to redound to my own discredit only, and not
to touch Oxford. Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely,
so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so
serene!
"There are our young barbarians all at play! "
And yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gar-
dens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last
enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by
her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal
of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection, to beauty, in a word,
which is only truth seen from another side? — nearer, perhaps,
than all the science of Tübingen. Adorable dreamer, whose
heart has been so romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally,
given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to the
Philistines! home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpop-
ular names, and impossible loyalties! what example could ever so
inspire us to keep down the Philistine in ourselves, what teacher
could ever so save us from that bondage to which we are all
prone, that bondage which Goethe, in his incomparable lines on
-


## p. 865 (#287) ############################################

MATTHEW ARNOLD
865
the death of Schiller, makes it his friend's highest praise (and
nobly did Schiller deserve the praise) to have left miles out of
sight behind him: the bondage of "was uns alle bandigt, Das
Gemeine! " She will forgive me, even if I have unwittingly
drawn upon her a shot or two aimed at her unworthy son; for
she is generous, and the cause in which I fight is, after all, hers.
Apparitions of a day, what is our puny warfare against the Phi-
listines, compared with the warfare which this queen of romance
has been waging against them for centuries, and will wage after
we are gone?
TO A FRIEND
WHO
но prop, thou ask'st, in these bad days, my mind? -
He much, the old man, who, clearest-souled of men,
Saw The Wide Prospect, and the Asian Fen,
And Tmolus hill, and Smyrna bay, though blind.
Much he, whose friendship I not long since won,
That halting slave, who in Nicopolis
Taught Arrian, when Vespasian's brutal son
Cleared Rome of what most shamed him. But be his
My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul,
From first youth tested up to extreme old age,
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild;
Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole;
The mellow glory of the Attic stage,
Singer of sweet Colonus, and its child.
YOUTH AND CALM
'TIS
Is death! and peace, indeed, is here,
And ease from shame, and rest from fear.
There's nothing can dismarble now
The smoothness of that limpid brow.
But is a calm like this, in truth,
The crowning end of life and youth,
And when this boon rewards the dead,
Are all debts paid, has all been said?
And is the heart of youth so light,
Its step so firm, its eye so bright,
Because on its hot brow there blows
A wind of promise and repose
From the far grave, to which it goes;
II-55


## p. 866 (#288) ############################################


866
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Because it has the hope to come,
One day, to harbor in the tomb?
Ah no, the bliss youth dreams is one
For daylight, for the cheerful sun,
For feeling nerves and living breath-
Youth dreams a bliss on this side death.
It dreams a rest, if not more deep,
More grateful than this marble sleep;
It hears a voice within it tell:
Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well.
'Tis all perhaps which man acquires,
But 'tis not what our youth desires.
WE
ISOLATION
TO MARGUERITE
E WERE apart; yet, day by day,
I bade my heart more constant be.
I bade it keep the world away,
And grow a home for only thee;
Nor feared but thy love likewise grew,
Like mine, each day, more tried, more true.
The fault was grave! I might have known,
What far too soon, alas! I learned-
The heart can bind itself alone,
And faith may oft be unreturned.
Self-swayed our feelings ebb and swell-
Thou lov'st no more;-Farewell! Farewell!
Farewell! -and thou, thou lonely heart,
Which never yet without remorse
Even for a moment didst depart
From thy remote and spherèd course
To haunt the place where passions reign-
Back to thy solitude again!
Back! with the conscious thrill of shame
Which Luna felt, that summer-night,
Flash through her pure immortal frame,
When she forsook the starry height
To hang over Endymion's sleep
Upon the pine-grown Latmian steep.
Yet she, chaste queen, had never proved
How vain a thing is mortal love,


## p. 867 (#289) ############################################

MATTHEW ARNOLD
867
Wandering in Heaven, far removed;
But thou hast long had place to prove
This truth-to prove, and make thine own:
"Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone. "
Or, if not quite alone, yet they
Which touch thee are unmating things-
Ocean and clouds and night and day;
Lorn autumns and triumphant springs;
And life, and others' joy and pain,
And love, if love, of happier men.
Of happier men- for they, at least,
Have dreamed two human hearts might blend
In one, and were through faith released
From isolation without end
Prolonged; nor knew, although not less
Alone than thou, their loneliness.
Yes! in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.
But when the moon their hollow lights,
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens, on starry nights,
The nightingales divinely sing;
And lovely notes, from shore to shore,
Across the sounds and channels pour—
Oh! then a longing like despair
Is to their farthest caverns sent;
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent!
Now round us spreads the watery plain-
Oh, might our marges meet again!
Who ordered that their longing's fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cooled?
Who renders vain their deep desire? -
A God, a God their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea


## p. 868 (#290) ############################################

868
MATTHEW ARNOLD
STANZAS IN MEMORY OF THE AUTHOR OF OBERMANN' (1849)
IN
IN FRONT the awful Alpine track
Crawls up its rocky stair;
The autumn storm-winds drive the rack,
Close o'er it. in the air.
Behind are the abandoned baths
Mute in their meadows lone;
The leaves are on the valley-paths,
The mists are on the Rhone —
The white mists rolling like a sea!
I hear the torrents roar.
- Yes, Obermann, all speaks of thee;
I feel thee near once more.
I turn thy leaves! I feel their breath
Once more upon me roll;
That air of languor, cold, and death,
Which brooded o'er thy soul.
Fly hence, poor wretch, whoe'er thou art,
Condemned to cast about,
All shipwreck in thy own weak heart,
For comfort from without!
A fever in these pages burns
Beneath the calm they feign;
A wounded human spirit turns,
Here, on its bed of pain.
Yes, though the virgin mountain-air
Fresh through these pages blows;
Though to these leaves the glaciers spare
The soul of their mute snows;
Though here a mountain-murmur swells
Of many a dark-boughed pine;
Though, as you read, you hear the bells
Of the high-pasturing kine-
Yet, through the hum of torrent lone,
And brooding mountain-bee,
There sobs I know not what ground-tone
Of human agony.
Is it for this, because the sound
Is fraught too deep with pain,


## p. 869 (#291) ############################################

MATTHEW ARNOLD
869
That, Obermann! the world around
So little loves thy strain?
And then we turn, thou sadder sage,
To thee! we feel thy spell!
-
- The hopeless tangle of our age,
Thou too hast scanned it well!
Immovable thou sittest, still
As death, composed to bear!
Thy head is clear, thy feeling chill,
And icy thy despair.
He who hath watched, not shared, the strife,
Knows how the day hath gone.
He only lives with the world's life
Who hath renounced his own.
To thee we come, then! Clouds are rolled
Where thou, O seer! art set;
Thy realm of thought is drear and cold-
The world is colder yet!
And thou hast pleasures, too, to share
With those who come to thee-
Balms floating on thy mountain-air,
And healing sights to see.
-
How often, where the slopes are green
On Jaman, hast thou sate
By some high chalet-door, and seen
The summer-day grow late;
And darkness steal o'er the wet grass
With the pale crocus starr'd,
And reach that glimmering sheet of glass
Beneath the piny sward,
Lake Leman's waters, far below!
And watched the rosy light
Fade from the distant peaks of snow;
And on the air of night
Heard accents of the eternal tongue
Through the pine branches play —


## p. 870 (#292) ############################################

870
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Listened and felt thyself grow young!
Listened, and wept-Away!
Away the dreams that but deceive!
And thou, sad guide, adieu!
I go, fate drives me; but I leave
Half of my life with you.
We, in some unknown Power's employ,
Move on a rigorous line;
Can neither, when we will, enjoy,
Nor, when we will, resign.
I in the world must live; - but thou,
Thou melancholy shade!
Wilt not, if thou can'st see me now,
Condemn me, nor upbraid.
For thou art gone away from earth,
And place with those dost claim,
The Children of the Second Birth,
Whom the world could not tame.
Farewell! Whether thou now liest near
That much-loved inland sea,
The ripples of whose blue waves cheer
Vevey and Meillerie;
And in that gracious region bland,
Where with clear-rustling wave
The scented pines of Switzerland
Stand dark round thy green grave,
Between the dusty vineyard-walls
Issuing on that green place,
The early peasant still recalls
The pensive stranger's face,
And stoops to clear thy moss-grown date
Ere he plods on again;
Or whether, by maligner fate,
Among the swarms of men,
Where between granite terraces
The blue Seine rolls her wave,


## p. 871 (#293) ############################################

MATTHEW ARNOLD
871
The Capital of Pleasures sees
Thy hardly-heard-of grave;-
-
Farewell! Under the sky we part,
In this stern Alpine dell.
O unstrung will! O broken heart!
A last, a last farewell!
MEMORIAL VERSES (1850)
OETHE in Weimar sleeps, and Greece,
G Long since, saw Byron's struggle cease,
But one such death remained to come;
The last poetic voice is dumb--
We stand to-day by Wordsworth's tomb.
When Byron's eyes were shut in death,
We bowed our head and held our breath.
He taught us little; but our soul
Had felt him like the thunder's roll.
With shivering heart the strife we saw
Of passion with eternal law;
And yet with reverential awe
We watched the fount of fiery life
Which served for that Titanic strife.
When Goethe's death was told, we said,
Sunk, then, is Europe's sagest head.
Physician of the iron age,
Goethe has done his pilgrimage.
He took the suffering human race,
-
He read each wound, each weakness clear;
And struck his finger on the place,
And said: Thou ailest here, and here!
He looked on Europe's dying hour
Of fitful dream and feverish power;
His eye plunged down the weltering strife,
The turmoil of expiring life—
He said. The end is everywhere,
Art still has truth, take refuge there!
And he was happy, if to know
Causes of things, and far below
His feet to see the lurid flow
Of terror, and insane distress,
And headlong fate, be happiness.


## p. 872 (#294) ############################################

872
MATTHEW ARNOLD
And Wordsworth! -Ah, pale ghosts, rejoice!
For never has such soothing voice
Been to your shadowy world conveyed,
Since erst, at morn, some wandering shade
Heard the clear song of Orpheus come
Through Hades, and the mournful gloom.
Wordsworth has gone from us--and ye,
Ah, may ye feel his voice as we!
He too upon a wintry clime
Had fallen-on this iron time
Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears.
He found us when the age had bound
Our souls in its benumbing round;
He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears.
He laid us as we lay at birth,
On the cool, flowery lap of earth.
Smiles broke from us and we had ease;
The hills were round us, and the breeze
Went o'er the sunlit fields again;
Our foreheads felt the wind and rain,
Our youth returned; for there was shed
On spirits that had long been dead,
Spirits dried up and closely furled,
The freshness of the early world.
Ah! since dark days still bring to light
Man's prudence and man's fiery might,
Time may restore us in his course
Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force;
But where will Europe's latter hour
Again find Wordsworth's healing power?
Others will teach us how to dare,
And against fear our breast to steel;
Others will strengthen us to bear-
But who, ah! who, will make us feel?
The cloud of mortal destiny,
Others will front it fearlessly—
But who, like him, will put it by?
Keep fresh the grass upon his grave,
O Rotha, with thy living wave!
Sing him thy best! for few or none
Hears thy voice right, now he is gone.


## p. 873 (#295) ############################################

MATTHEW ARNOLD
873
THE SICK KING IN BOKHARA
O
HUSSEIN
MOST just Vizier, send away
The cloth-merchants, and let them be,
Them and their dues, this day! the King
Is ill at ease, and calls for thee.
THE VIZIER
O merchants, tarry yet a day
Here in Bokhara! but at noon,
To-morrow, come, and ye shall pay
Each fortieth web of cloth to me,
As the law is, and go your way.
O Hussein, lead me to the King!
Thou teller of sweet tales,- thine own,
Ferdousi's, and the others',- lead!
How is it with my lord?
HUSSEIN
Alone,
Ever since prayer-time, he doth wait,
O Vizier! without lying down,
In the great window of the gate,
Looking into the Registàn,
Where through the sellers' booths the slaves
Are this way bringing the dead man. —
O Vizier, here is the King's door!
THE KING
O Vizier, I may bury him?
THE VIZIER
O King, thou know'st, I have been sick
These many days, and heard no thing
(For Allah shut my ears and mind),
Not even what thou dost, O King!
Wherefore, that I may counsel thee,
Let Hussein, if thou wilt, make haste
To speak in order what hath chanced.


## p. 874 (#296) ############################################


874
MATTHEW ARNOLD
THE KING
O izier, be it as thou say'st!
HUSSEIN
Three days since, at the time of prayer,
A certain Moollah, with his robe
All rent, and dust upon his hair,
Watched my lord's coming forth, and pushed
The golden mace-bearers aside,
And fell at the King's feet, and cried:-
"Justice, O King, and on myself!
On this great sinner, who did break
The law, and by the law must die!
Vengeance, O King! "
—
But the King spake :-
"What fool is this, that hurts our ears
With folly? or what drunken slave?
My guards, what, prick him with your spears!
Prick me the fellow from the path! "
As the King said, so was it done,
And to the mosque my lord passed on.
--
But on the morrow when the King
Went forth again, the holy book
Carried before him, as his right,
And through the square his way he took,
My man comes running, flecked with blood
From yesterday, and falling down
Cries out most earnestly:-"O King,
My lord, O King, do right, I pray!
"How canst thou, ere thou hear, discern
If I speak folly? but a king,
Whether a thing be great or small,
Like Allah, hears and judges all.
"Wherefore hear thou! Thou know'st how fierce
In these last days the sun hath burned;
That the green water in the tanks
Is to a putrid puddle turned;
And the canal, that from the stream
Of Samarcand is brought this way,
Wastes, and runs thinner every day.


## p.