which pleased him. They were these: "Let there be priests to preserve the known, and let them, as is their office, magnify their office, and say, 'It is all'; but there shall also be priests to vindicate the unknown, nor shall it be accounted presumption in them to maintain, 'It is not all!'" Matthew Arnold had no quarrel with the known, but he himself was a priest of the unknown, and for its vindication he labored till the end. We talk of doubt, but the real doubt was not in him. His eye was single, and in all that is most lovely, most sacred, most abiding he believed; but he spoke, in a time of spiritual conflict and transition-state of opinion, to the needs of a doubt-sick world—a world grown material and skeptical of good, which, casting all faith behind, questions whether it be not well to eat, drink, and be merry, since to-morrow we die.
Long fed on boundless hopes, O race of man,
How angrily thou spurn'st all simpler fare!
"Christ," some one says, "was human as we are;
No judge eyes us from Heaven, our sin to scan;
We live no more when we have done our span."—
"Well, then, for Christ," thou answerest, "who can care?
From sin, which Heaven records not, why forbear?
Live we like brutes, our life without a plan?"
So answerest thou; but why not rather say:
"Hath man no second life?—Pitch this one high!
Sits there no judge in Heaven, our sin to see?—
More strictly, then, the inward judge obey!
Was Christ a man like us?—Ah! let us try
If we then, too, can be such men as he!"
So replied he to the forlorn unbelief of the age; so, and in even loftier strains, in his "East London."
A recent writer, in speaking of these two sonnets, says, "There may be better poetry in the English language, but there are no better sermons." Whatever our differences of opinion, it must be admitted that Matthew Arnold was always, and clearly, on the side of religion, virtue, and the ideal. The last years of his life he devoted to the salvation of men from their doubts, and some he saved. In a quotation of incomparable felicity he has defined the infallible Church Catholic, as "the prophetic soul of the wide world, dreaming on things to come." Of that church he preached the evangel, and its wistful musings; its deathless aspirations he declared. Many will say they believed more than he, and therefore did not need him. Let them rejoice, who were already so happy, but let them remember, what in "Literature and Dogma" he distinctly avows, that "he did not speak to them." A benefactor of the race, eagerly interested in its mental and spiritual progress, the future will award him the praise he bestowed on Emerson: "He was the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit."
It is habitual with some, at mention of the name of Matthew Arnold, to speak of what they call his gloom. "He is so sad," they say, "so hopeless, so depressing." Of the prevalent misapprehensions concerning him, this seems the most curious; and marveling how any who have read him can have arrived at so inadequate a conclusion, one is tempted to question whether the objectors to his "gloom" can, indeed, have read him, save in the most fragmentary way. Those to whom his writings are undoubtedly known, even where their prejudices lead them to feel that one holding his heretical opinions should be gloomy, hopeless, sad, admit that he was not so, and bear ready witness to his buoyancy, to the high courage and cheerfulness with which, under conditions the most adverse and dispiriting, "he onward fared, by his own heart inspired." Of his verse Richard Holt Hutton remarks: "It is this sense of pure refreshment in Nature, this calm amid feverish strife, this dew after hot thought, that determines the style of his studies of Nature. His poetry of this kind is the sweetest, the most tranquilizing, the most quieting of its sort to be found in English literature." Mr. Augustine Birrell calls attention to an assertion made in the London "Spectator" that Mr. Arnold's poetry "has never consoled anybody." Of this assertion he indignantly declares:
A falser statement was never made innocently. Mr. Arnold's poetry has been found full of consolation! How could it be otherwise? His love of nature and treatment of nature have been to many a vexed soul a great joy and an intense relief. . . . He was most distinctly on the side of human enjoyment. The world's sights and sounds were dear to him: "the uncrumpling fern," "the eternal moon-lit snow," "sweet-william, with its homely cottage-smell," "the red grouse, springing at our sound," "the tinkling bells of the high-pasturing kine"—human loves, joys, sorrows, all interested, touched, or amused him. He is not a bulky poet,—three volumes contain him,—but hardly a page can be opened without the eye lighting on verse which at one time or another has been, either to you or some one dear to you, strength or joy.
And in this connection we have Arnold's own testimony. Of Emerson he says:
