tion, as clear-cut and unequivocal as a chemist's analysis. He feels that he has thoroughly analysed English characteristics when he has classified his countrymen as 'Philistines, Barbarians, and the Populace.' To fix a certain aspect of things by an appropriate phrase is the process which corresponded with him to a scientific analysis. But may not this method merely lead to the substitution of one set of prejudices for another; the prejudices, say, of the fastidious don for the prejudices of the coarser tradesman? The Frenchman who calls the Englishman empêré may be as narrow-minded as the Englishman who calls the Frenchman a frog-eater. Certainly, Arnold would reply. What we need is to make a stream of fresh thought play freely about our stock 'notions and habits.'[1] We have to get out of an unfruitful and mechanical routine. Or, as he puts it in another way, his one qualification for teaching his countrymen is, he says, his belief in the 'primary needfulness of seeing things as they really are, and of the greater importance of ideas than of the machinery which exists for them.'[2] That is, we want, above all things, to get rid of
- ↑ Culture and Anarchy (1893), p. 121.
- ↑ St. Paul and Protestantism (1870), p. 70.
