admit the energy and brilliancy of the partisans of physical science, and their present favour with the public, to be far greater than his own, and still have a happy faith that the nature of things works silently on behalf of the studies which he loves, and that while we shall all have to acquaint ourselves with the great results reached by modern science, and to give ourselves as much training in its disciplines as we can conveniently carry, yet the majority of men will always require humane letters; and so much the more, as they have the more and the greater results of science to relate to the need in man for conduct, and to the need in him for beauty."

CHAPTER VI

POLITICS AND SOCIETY

This treatment of politics with one's thought, or with one's imagination, or with one's soul, in place of the common treatment of them with one's Philistinism and with one's passions, is the only thing that can reconcile, it seems to me, any serious person to politics, with their inevitable wear, waste, and sore trial to all that is best in one.-Letters, I, 249.

RNOLD'S political and his social thought are

AR

indetachably related. He always treated politics as an instrument for the renovation of society. It was the renovation of society, however,—not the instrument for the renovation,-which really excited his "thought," his "imagination," his "soul." This he declared to the Ipswich Working Men's College in the address called "Ecce, Convertimur Ad Gentes" (Mixed Essays): "I am no politician. .. Indeed, I have no very ardent interest,-if you will allow me to speak for a moment of myself and of what interests me,-in politics in their present state in this country. What interests me is English civilization; and our politics in their present state do not seem to me to have much bearing upon that. English civilization, the humanising, the bring

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ing into one harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society,—that is what interests me. I try to be a disinterested observer of all which really helps and hinders that."

But though Arnold was not a politician, he was that thorn in the flesh of "practical" politicians—an independent political critic. A stalwart partisan he could not be. A political critic in his sense of the word—a man bent upon knowing the best and striving to make it prevail-can not tie himself to any set of politicians or to any fixed body of party principles. He must keep himself free to expose energetically the errors of all parties, and to second effort in the right direction, wherever it is initiated. His tendency is just the opposite of that of the practical politician. The practical politician apparently strives to emphasize and widen the gulf between his party and the opposition by a wholly uncritical denunciation of the opposition and a wholly uncritical laudation of his own party; his passion for prevailing predominates over his desire to know the best. The political critic, whose passion for knowing the best predominates over his desire to prevail, tends to meditate between the parties, and to draw them ever more closely together by condemning the characteristic excesses of both, and by commending the characteristic virtues of each to the other. Much as practical politicians despise and fear the independent critic, he holds the whip of political prog

ress. In a democracy, that party remains in power longest which follows his hint and invites his vote by quietly assimilating as much as it can of the virtues of the opposition.

Arnold's political independence is the result of his internal equilibrium. If one asks, not what were his political ideas, but what was his political temper, the answer may be given with assurance: He was of the conservative temper. Everything that was instinctive in him inclined him toward the anciently established aristocratic order of things in England. His early education and his social connections tended to strengthen his conservative instincts. Yet as a matter of fact he was neither a reactionary nor a "standpatter"; he declared that he would never vote for a Tory. He could not settle back in an easy chair and praise the existing order, nor express the irresponsible hope that it would last out his time. By taking thought he had become ardently progressive. He supplemented and controlled his temperament with ideas and with the intellectual passion which they begot. To the instinct for preserving what was good in the past he added an eager vision and a desire of something better in the future. He wanted the "something better" in the future to be much more widely distributed than "what was good" in the past. He could not be happy in a small cultivated class surrounded by a great multitude of Philistines. He aimed at something like the democ

racy of Athens-without the slaves. He aspired toward a society "in the grand style" for everybody

-a society as free and equal and fraternal as that expected by Robespierre, but intellectually fine and esthetically finished, like that enjoyed by Pericles. He was, in short, so passionately aristocratic that he wanted to make all men aristocratic. That remote ideal he had in mind when he called himself "a Liberal of the future."

Toward that good he could not see that either the Conservatives or the Liberals of his own day were making much progress. To the Tory element he devotes relatively little attention. His criticism of them is in general directed at their mental inflexibility and at their indisposition to do anything important. A Tory at the best is a man of sense and some grounding in the eternal verities; but he is disposed to be sluggish, averse to change, hostile to new ideas; he wishes to preserve things as they are; he is content to "muddle along." He is respectable in that he is not the dupe of theorizers; he keeps in touch with realities. What he lacks is vision, generosity, passion for improvement. Many more and much harsher criticisms than these, Arnold utters against the contemporary Whigs or Liberals-not that he loved them less, but that he expected more of them. The liberal movement, in an age of triumphing democracy, was the movement which most needed and most invited critical direction. His crit