eign spark, while at the same time his free and quiet spirit brought our own detachment to bear humorously on the Continent itself. He forced our minds to travel a fruitful task; for, again to quote Shakespeare, "Speculation turns not to itself till it hath travelled, and married there where it may see itself." He helped English politics, religion, and manners to observe themselves as a certain French school-the school that wants everything to be en règle— is now, in M. Boutmy's book, once more scanning their lack of symmetry and proportion. He taught them to view their measure of spiritual and intellectual famine, as German Geist long ago regarded it: their haphazard organization, as German science now criticises it. But it should not be forgotten that another French school of thought has extolled these very irregularities of independence and individuality, the harshnesses of which are now being censured by M. Taine's disciple. Nor equally should we forget that by prerogative of these very qualities Arnold himself showed England to be the nurse of poets; whereas Heine, at any rate (that Heine from whom Arnold caught so much), exclaimed, "Send no poet to England.” But Heine was here only for a short space, under unfavorable auspices and at a time when Disraeli (who also forced us to travel1) observed, in "Popanilla," we had "too much to do ever to think;" and our fogs, too, depressed the poet. "What," long afterwards said Disraeli again, "what can you expect but a very serious minister in a country of fogs peopled by Nonconformists?"

Doubtless, perhaps luckily, Arnold himself was by no means without

It would have been interesting to follow the likeness and divergences of Arnold's views and those of one whose "Asiatic prose" sometimes made the critic among poets shiver. There is a passage in "Sybil" about the stock utilitarian with his argument of "cheaper silk stockings" which is echoed by another in "Culture and Anarchy" (p. 146). The ideas of both respecting the

strong insular limits. While he loathed the self-satisfaction of the smug, his own passionless serenity shed some airs of Olympian patronage. Much as he disrelished the crabbed and withering side of Puritanism, deeply as he deplored all those elements which by forsaking the Church tended to sever national existence from national history, there remained a Puritan strain both in his own sober strenuousness, and in his only fanaticism-that for the fastidious. His urbane shudders at violence and vehemence tended to recoil from the kindling fires of the imagination; his chaste and chastening touch grew timid of grossness to a fault, till, like his own Sainte-Beuve, he lived to find "the critic in him prevail more and more, and push out the poet." So much it is well to recollect, and also to forget. By style, thought, and example, without a doubt, he raised our standards of writing, thinking, and living. His gentle mockeries coaxed even while they caught the weak points of both sides. His persuasiveness still holds its international spell; nor will his fame, in going round the world, ever (as Heine railed at Cousin's) begin by departing from its own country. The winning, lingering irony and "sweet reasonableness" strike without wounding, teach without preaching, and, as it were, steal into the being. And he owned the rare faculty of rendering ideas in their habit as they live: under his wand they never move awkwardly in their new surroundings. Carlyle's German ideas often look very like Scotch Covenanters'; George Eliot's speak sometimes with a broken accent. We remember, long ago, a picture in a Ger"middle-middles," "natural rights," and our "pouvoir sans savoir" are the same. Disraeli's comparison of our golden youth with the Greeks who read no books and lived chiefly in the open air tallies in essence with Arnold's "young barbarians all at play," and Arnold has expressed himself about monarchy much in the sense of Disraeli.

man illustrated paper of Mr. Gladstone delivering a great financial speech: "Sir Gladstone legt das Budget dem Unterhause vor." Despite the likeness, the portrait was that of a German; and, as it fares with persons, so it often does with ideas.

What Arnold realized most about the national mind, with all our civil freedom, was its unbending stiffness. It is a gouty mind, stiff from generous diet, and testy from want of exercise. Our contentiousness was noticed by Tacitus long before civilization had cleared our forests without erasing our habits. We still worship measures and machinery at the expense of the ideas to which they lead, and for which they should exist. When once a "reform" is "passed," we deal with it as Sheridan did with his I.O.U., and ejaculate "Thank God, that is settled." England is more the home of uneven character than of ideas, of discovery and invention and enterprise than of clear intelligence, of individual genius suspected by the community than of a community itself; the community is not social, still less what Germans style "genial." It heaves and grates and creaks in its movement; it is random and incoherent; it blunders into absurdity and stumbles on success; it needs alertness in every direction. is a work of exuberant, though of very northern, nature, and not of polished art or calculating science.

It

So much we concede, yet it is just here that we think Arnold's pallor of imagination a trifle anæmic. No smooth and perfect community is possible except among small peoples, and without some sacrifice, both of the many to the few on the one hand, and of paramount individuality to schools or groups on the other. It is however through leading and stirring personalities far more than through coteries of art or thought that ideals are attained. Action can never be so har

monious as these, but it begets the passions and circumstances that transform them; whereas the pattern of "social equality" dispenses with initiative. But Arnold well discerned that England at all times is more concerned with a practical present and the liberty to deal with it as she likes than with anything else; and in this M. Boutmy (somewhat a critic of outsides) agrees with him. "The world of ideas," Arnold has commented, "is the possible, the future," Disraeli went further and called ideas "divine." The want in our midst of a "root" for such ideas, Arnold, rightly, we think, ascribes to "the want of flexibility of our race." None the less, he fails to dive deeper. He does not stop to inquire whether racial complexion changes by being dipped in the colors or atmosphere of other races; whether after all the homœopathic prescription may not prove the wisest for us; whether national strength is not the promptest cure for national weakness; whether the defects of vigor cannot best be remedied by vigor itself; whether the higher zeal is not the best corrective of the lower, and the heavenly thunder, of our platform-Boanerges. Nor does he, nor

does M. Boutmy, adequately avow two real effects of our elements. First, that our love of bone and muscle makes, through the public spirit of games and sports, for social union, if not for social harmony. And, secondly, that our crassness for ideas comes from slowness of brain and not from niggardliness of welcome. After all, Giordano Bruno was here; Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau and Beaumarchais, Mazzini and Marx have been here; and hither every political refugee and original genius still journeys. England is, indeed, an asylum for invalid idealists and incurable ideas. But with our foreign censors these and the like considerations fade into the background. The cure put forward by Arnold is

of course the Greek spirit: one in many essentials so alien to the modern; one which sprang from small communities with large leisured classes, and perhaps requires the same conditions for its revival; one which in its own intellectual line was just as exclusive as the Hebrew spirit in its own line of sublime conduct, as the English spirit in its peculiar line of self-willed action; one for which Arnold, true here to his French method, demands "authority" and "centralization," the very mechanisms most repugnant to its political genius and our own. The tunic can scarcely be fitted on the Briton at any time, still less by sumptuary laws.

"Hellenism," remarks Arnold, "which we have so neglected, may be liable to fail in moral strength and earnestness, but by the law of its nature

it opposes itself to the notion of cutting our being in two. . . . Essential to Hellenism is the impulse to the development of the whole man, to connecting and harmonizing all parts of him, perfecting all, leaving none to take their chance." England is spurred into action by a diversity of free discussion. Out of opinions she determines. Opinions Arnold held should be schooled by ideas. He came to regard our liberty, energy, and industry as excellent horses ridden on the right road to the right goal with management, but as dangerous jades if ridden otherwise. By "culture," he means the science of our horsemanship, the gymnastics of the mind. "If your newspapers," he exclaims, "can say what they like, you think you are sure of being well advised; that comes of your inaptitude for ideas, and aptitude for claptrap [of which he considered both Parliament and America as a "Thyestean orgy'], you can never see two

2Goethe has noticed this most strikingly in his "Shakespeare und kein Ende" when he insists that the antique spirit was for the "shall," whether as destiny or duty; the modern, for the "will,"

sides of a question." Arnold as absolute idealist peeps out in the "two sides." The mere man of ideas would sight two hundred. Moreover he seems to us mistaken in attributing our bungles to a bare "inaptitude for ideas," to imperceptiveness; they arise far more in a practical age and commercial country with unbroken traditions, a country too (with due respect to Mr. Paul) of continuous, if broadening, classes, from a lack of alertness, and from the settled habits which indispose free citizens to submit to the yoke of science or government. And here lies the danger, not of his criticism, so often just, but of his remedies. There is surely as much "claptrap" latent among "the children of light" as patent among "the children of the established fact." Steep by all means individuals and individualities in ideas, and discipline them to choose, steep the community at large in the system of science-in a word reform your education at both ends. But do not attempt to "cultivate" your masses. Even if it were feasible to steep the community in ideas, to make the leopard change his spots, it would not prove expedient for the community as opposed to individuals. Idealism uncurbed by the free warfare of opinion on the one hand, untrammelled by scientific habits on the other, has ere now conducted nations to anarchy, and chaos, and despotism. Communities fed on bare idealism have ere now, in their turn, idolized means as ends and made their own fetiches of "fads"; and if these perils lurk in untempered idealism, they lurk still more in theories about ideas. England's practical, untheoretic, phlegmatic way at least affords a choice of ideas and even of science in every department. But Arnold's method was theoretic in the extreme. His manner is French, and French of a doctrinaire school. Its quest is after neither rigid science nor

absolute art. It seeks to point out the way in which ideas can be universally applied without taking race, personality, climate, inheritance, into sufficient account; without bringing imagination into play. German idealism— Geist-makes no such attempt; French Esprit does. Let us examine these words so often used, so often confused even by Arnold, a little more closely. Esprit is quick wittedness, incisiveness, and clearsightedness of intellect, intelligence armed and equipped, distinguishing and distinguished. Geist,

on the other hand, that Geist which filled Lessing, and which Goethe made his own, means something more and in essentials different. It means soulfulness of mind, the charity as well as the clarity of intuition; what Arnold himself, not thinking of Geist, has hinted in a line of his "Merope":

The noble thought which is alone the

man.

Esprit is intellect as experienced connoisseur collecting, arranging ideas in beautiful order. Geist, more as an affectionate friend; or, to change our figures, Esprit is the model innkeeper assorting all comers, entertaining, appraising them, explaining to them every point of the road, disposing them to return, but ever mindful of his professional routine. Geist is the perfect host, discriminating, yet spontaneous, communicable, inspiriting; putting all his guests at ease, personally attractive quite apart from his rank or garb. There is far more imagination about Geist than about Esprit; far less of direct teaching; and in imagination resides a perceptive sympathy, the fellowship of realized neighborhood. Esprit constantly treats persons from the standpoint of movements or currents, and is less able to embody ideas and causes as individuals. This can be marked in the way which French lucidity chooses for handling all that

affects freedom. The French libertyhowever hymned and adored-remains something outside the citizen, something dependent on systems that do things for him. Even the sentimental Rousseau demands and invents a theory, a scheme of ideas. And in this regard it is strange to note how many leaders of Esprit have themselves been pedagogues. Such for a time was Rousseau himself, so were Joubert and Sainte-Beuve. So has been M. Boutmy. Esprit lectures, as did Arnold, on ideas. How removed from the old German bias, which in despair of gaining political liberty sought a metaphysical and musical or a poetical freedom in its own dreamy "inner-consciousness"! How removed from our own, which exacts liberty in action! How different, too, its methods from Heine's idea pictures-from that famous one, translated by Arnold, which portrays English liberty as the lawful wife, who however may one day be sold at Smithfield; French liberty as the petted mistress who may at any moment be forsaken in caprice, but German liberty as the old grandmother, whom the German will never quite abandon; "for her he will always keep a nook by the chimney-corner where she can tell her fairy stories to the listening children." Here we have more than imaginative wit; we have imaginative humor, imaginative pathos. For pathos, Esprit proper has no room. And yet Arnold only says of this very passage, "What wit in that saying which everyone has heard!"

Goethe himself has acknowledged these properties of Geist. Asked whether that word had been rightly translated by Esprit, he replied that Geist was âme in addition. And in his "Bildung und Umbildung Organischen Naturen," "How few," he observes, "feel themselves inspired by what is purely intellectual! Our senses, our feelings, our moods wield far greater

power over us; and with justice, for the human call is for action, not for contemplation." Goethe addressed a disunited nation split into small communities, one too whose freedom of thought has always been more forward than its freedom of action. By Geist he gave it a mental centre of union. To what has even Geist led united Germany, just because of inertness in political initiative? To a narrow castemilitarism, more jealous now even than when Arnold first observed it, to social disunion, and hampered movement; to a rudeness and an inequality-in a word to a "Philisterei" far exceeding any that Arnold arraigned in our midst.

How, again, was Esprit native to France? By that knack for neatness, that emotion and sentiment (rather than enthusiasm) for system and centralization, for "college rules," which have always distinguished her, under all her forms of government. And to what has it conducted the people of courtesy and conversation? To a preponderancy of the épicier, the Philistine unmatched before; to a dearth of commanding individuality and selfreliance, after which in her heart of hearts she still sighs-to level, uncumbered parterres, well trimmed by paid gardeners. These things are matters of race tradition and climate, points on which M. Boutmy dwells, it seems to us, with appropriateness. You cannot transplant them here any more than the weather. Voltaire, the quintessence of esprit, observed of our style that, whereas the Frenchman said all he could, the Englishman said all he wished. England has her immeasurable Shakespeare, and Voltaire termed him "un sauvage ivre." It was once remarked that a variety of tastes is excellent, because otherwise we should have no mixed biscuits. That is England all over-variety and mixed biscuits. But Arnold wants to civilize

us by sweet uniformity and the very best biscuits only, by ambrosia.

Taste is the standard of Esprit, and taste is the method of Arnold's "culture" even when he expounds Geist, which is often erratic and may be actually slipshod. Esprit in a dressinggown! The idea is preposterous, but old German Geist, among its mists of tobacco-smoke, is constantly in "Schlafrock" and slippers-not in the "grand style" at all. And yet the humaner methods of Geist, of soulfulness of mind, intuition, suit the rough edges and sharp angles of what Mr. Gilbert would call "our Island way," far better, will more readily rub against them aright than the methods of Esprit. Arnold, however, wants to transfigure our senses, our feelings, our moods, less by weaning them from their native brutality and narrowness, by winning them to their own best possibilities, than by converting them into accord with "right-reason," by the "free and disinterested play of the mind"; by "culture," in whose pile-carpeted halls energy and passion must hush their abashed footfalls, and from whose catalogued art-treasures prejudice may be schooled to choose. After our din of tempest Arnold demands the still small voice. From the tumult of action and the selfishness of industrialism he stands aloof. He finds the traffic both of life and letters congested; he would have it regulated by a constable turned philosopher. Not that Arnold himself is systematic. He, as both Mr. Russell and Mr. Paul point out, disclaimed any such desire in his Socratic, his "easy, sinuous, unpolemical way" of discussing things; but his whole criticism is based on theory, and his very repetitions, complained of by Mr. Paul, are academic, the repetitions of a lecturer. All this part of him is Esprit, not Geist. The French influence fell on him-a nursling of his father, Oxford, and Wordsworth-long before