Page:Matthew Arnold, Coates, Century, April 1894.djvu/7

936 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.

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:

And in this connection we have Arnold's own testimony. Of Emerson he says:

Yes, truly, his insight is admirable; his truth is precious. Yet the secret of his effect is not in these; it is in his temper. It is in the hopeful, serene, beautiful temper wherewith these, in Emerson, are indissolubly joined. He says himself: "We judge of a man's wisdom by his hope, knowing that the perception of the inexhaustibleness of nature is an immortal youth." . . . His abiding word for us, the word by which being dead he yet speaks to us, is this: "That which befits us, embosomed in beauty and wonder as we are, is cheerfulness and courage, and the endeavor to realize our aspirations." One can scarcely