Page:Studies of a Biographer 2.djvu/124

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112
STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER

of science, but a term of poetry and eloquence—a term 'thrown out' at a not fully grasped object of consciousness—a literary term, in short–– with various indefinite meanings for different people.[1] The 'magnified and non-natural man' of whom theologians speak is to be superseded by the 'stream of tendency' or the 'not ourselves which makes for righteousness'; and, in expressing his contempt for the vulgar conceptions, he perhaps sometimes forgot his usual good taste, as in the famous reference to the three Lords Shaftesbury. Such phrases might be taken for the scoffing which he condemned in others. I glanced the other day at a satirical novel, in which the writer asks whether an old Irishwoman is to say, instead of 'God bless you,' 'the stream of tendency bless you.' I then opened the preface to Arnold's God and the Bible and found him making a similar criticism upon Mr. Herbert Spencer. Nobody, he observes, would say, 'The unknowable is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.'

Arnold's answer to his critic would, in fact, have been that he never proposed that the old Irishwoman should give up her form of expression. He professed to be simply explaining her real

  1. Literature and Dogma, p. 12.