Page:Matthew Arnold (IA matthewarnold00harr).pdf/29

 strength of Catholicism, about Pagan and Mediæval religious sentiment, about Spinoza, about Butler, Marcus Aurelius, and Goethe! And how valuable are his hints about education! All of these, and many more, are radically sound, and gain much by the pellucid grace and precision with which they are presented. They are presented, it is true, rather as the treasure-trove of instinctive taste than as the laborious conclusions of any profound logic; for Culture, as we have often said, naturally approached even the problems of the Universe, not so much from the side of Metaphysics as from the side of Belles Lettres. I can remember Matthew Arnold telling us with triumph that he had sought to exclude from a certain library a work of Herbert Spencer, by reading to the committee a passage therefrom which he pronounced to be clumsy in style. He knew as little about Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy as he did about Comte's, which he pretended to discuss with an air of laughable superiority, at which no doubt he was himself the first to laugh.

Arnold, indeed, like M. Jourdain, was constantly talking Comte without knowing it, and was quite delighted to find how cleverly he could do it. There is a charming and really grand passage in which he sums up his conclusion at the close of his Culture and Anarchy. I cannot resist the pleasure of quoting this fine piece of English, every word of which I devoutly believe:—