Page:Matthew Arnold, Coates, Century, April 1894.djvu/5

934 warfare which this queen of romance has been waging against them for centuries, and will wage after we are gone?

But Arnold's devotion to his native land is not more apparent in passages such as these than in those sentences wherein he reproves her.

Nor is a true devotion more marked in his praise than in the temper with which he answers the critics of his nation's faults; to Heine's bitter censures replying:

"It is impossible," says a recent writer, "for any sane person who knows England, and who knows America, to read Matthew Arnold's exposition of the English character, and say that it is in the main untrue." For ourselves, we may deplore, not that he criticized us, but that one so exceptionally qualified had not the opportunity of knowing and of telling us more as to our defects.

It should perhaps not seem strange that since his death there has been manifest in certain quarters a desire to lessen the influence of Arnold by emphasizing in him the quality of unbelief. "Truth provokes those whom she does not convert," and we are slow to forgive the disturbers of our doctrine. Still, it becomes us to acquaint ourselves with the character of the unbelief we condemn, remembering that it is St. Paul who says, "After the way which they call heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers."

There were published some time ago, and by an authority whose literary decisions as to Mr. Arnold—excepting in so far as they are biased by theological prejudice—are of the best we have yet had, two papers, treating of Newman as the poet of faith and of Arnold as the poet of doubt. And since the writer is not alone in his attempt to magnify the faith of Newman by contrasting it with what is termed Arnold's "doubt," we should ask ourselves upon what grounds such comparisons are based, and for what good reasons these two are selected as typical of qualities so opposed. In this connection, it is interesting to remember that of modern men of genius Matthew Arnold's favorite was John Henry Newman. Many will recall the noble and characteristic sentences which open the lecture on Emerson; wherein, recalling the days when he was an undergraduate at Oxford, Arnold declares, "Voices were in the air there which haunt my memory still," "Happy the man who in that susceptible season of youth hears such voices! They are a possession to him forever." Of those voices Newman's most deeply penetrated the heart of the impressionable student, and though Arnold afterward came to feel that in becoming a Roman Catholic Newman had adopted "for the doubts and difficulties which beset men's minds to-day a solution which, to speak frankly, is impossible," he never ceased to admire in him the combination of traits—the mingled gentleness and irony, lucidity and urbanity—which had captivated his boyish imagination, nor to revere in him the inspirer of his youth. I know of no picture of Newman so winning, so altogether gracious, as that at the beginning of the lecture on Emerson.

Faith and doubt are dangerous terms, readily interchangeable, and requiring at each recurrence to be freshly defined. That Matthew Arnold had "doubts," there can be no question. But how was he singular in this regard? Had the author of Job no doubts? Had Milton, Goethe, Coleridge, Heine, Shelley, Kingsley, Clough, Tennyson, Emerson, no doubts? Had Newman himself no doubts? In a pamphlet published in 1838,the cardinal attempted, so he tells us, "to place the doctrine of the Real Presence on an intellectual basis, by the denial of the existence of Space, except as a subjective idea of our minds." From this it would appear that he had important doubts, since he doubted the existence of space itself. But the entire "Apologia pro Vita sua" is the history of