ABSTRACT
The union of this element with the other parts of his mind, his love of literature, of perfect expression, his interest in life at large, constitutes perhaps the originality of his character as a critic, and it certainly (to my sense) gives him that seriousness in which he has occasionally been asserted to be wanting. Nothing can exceed the taste, the temperance, with which he handles religious questions, and at the same time nothing can exceed the impression he gives of really caring for them. To his mind the religious life of humanity is the most important thing in the spectacle humanity offers us, and he holds that a due perception of this fact is (in connection with other lights) the measure of the acuteness of a critic, the wisdom of a poet. He says in his essay on Marcus Aurelius an admirable thing-‘The paramount virtue of religion is that it has lighted up morality;’ and such a phrase as that shows the extent to which he feels what he speaks of. To say that this feeling, taken in combination with his love of letters, of beauty, of all liberal things, constitutes an originality is not going too far, for the religious sentiment does not always render the service of opening the mind to human life at large. Ernest Renan, in France, is, as every one knows, the great and brilliant representative of such a union; he has treated religion as he might have treated one of the fine arts. Of him it may even be said, that though he has never spoken of it but as the sovereign thing in life, yet there is in him, as an interpreter of the conscience of man, a certain dandyism, a slight fatuity, of worldly culture, of which Mr. Arnold too has been accused, but from which (with the smaller assurance of an Englishman in such matters) he is much more exempt. Mr. Arnold touches M.Renan on one side, as he touches Sainte-Beuve on the other (I make this double rapprochement because he has been spoken of more than once as the most Gallicised of English writers); and if he has gone less into the details of literature than the one, he has gone more than the other into the application of religion to questions of life. He has applied it to the current problems of English society. He has endeavoured to light up with it, to use his own phrase, some of the duskiest and most colourless of these. He has cultivated urbanity almost as successfully as M.Renan, and he has cultivated reality rather more. As I have spoken of the reader who has been a stranger in England feeling that Mr. Arnold meets him half way, and yet of our author being at bottom English of the English, I may add here, in confirmation of this, that his theological pertinacity, as one may call it, his constant implication of the nearness of religion, his use of the Scriptures, his love of biblical phraseology, are all so many deeply English notes. He has all that taste for theology which characterises our race when our race is left to its own devices; he evidently has read an immense number of sermons. He is impregnated with the associations of Protestantism, saturated with the Bible, and though he has little love for the Puritans, no Puritan of them all was ever more ready on all occasions with a text either from the Old Testament or from the New. The appreciative stranger (whom
I go on imagining) has to remind himself of the force of these associations of Protestantism in order to explain Mr. Arnold’s fondness for certain quotations which doubtless need the fragrance that experience and memory may happen to give them to reveal their full charm. Nothing could be more English, more Anglican, for instance, than our author’s enjoyment of sundry phrases of Bishop Wilson-phrases which to the uninitiated eye are often a little pale. This does not take from the fact that Mr. Arnold has a real genius for quotation. His pages are full, not only of his own good things, but of those of every one else. More than any critic of the day he gives, from point to point, an example of what he means. The felicity of his illustrations is extreme; even if he sometimes makes them go a little further than they would and sees in them a little more than is visible to the average reader. Of course, in his frequent reference to the Bible, what is free and happy and personal to himself is the use he makes of it.
