Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/297

 Reviews and Notes 291 and heeded; and in recent years his influence has somewhat increased. Here may be taken up one or two minor points. It has been alleged, and with justice, that Arnold misrepresented the Hebrews and the Greeks when he spoke of the Hebrews as all for conduct and the Greeks as all for beauty. 2 It will not do to judge the Hebrew by the utterances of the prophets, any more than one would judge of the conduct of average America by the condemnatory remarks of Mr. Sunday. Likewise the Greeks are not necessarily to be adjudged as irreligious and as universally given to a worship of estheticism. If we were able to compare the rank and file of the Greeks with the rank and file of the Israelites, it may be doubted if we should find one people widely differing in moral principles from the other. For both, religion consisted primarily and chiefly in keeping Jahve or the gods appeased and good-natured. Neither con- nected religion with moral conduct in our sense of the term. It may be questioned whether in the fifth century B.C., say, the average Hebrew was much more moral than the average Greek due allowance being made, of course, for the different standards and types of morality developed by the two peoples. If the prophets of Israel describe and plead for a high ideal of moral conduct, "no modern theology has taught higher and purer moral notions than those of JEschylus and his school, developed afterwards by Socrates and Plato, but first attained by the genius of ^Eschylus. Thus he censures high-handedness even in the gods (Prometheus), so laying the foundation for that great doctrine of immutable morality which is the basis of modern ethics. Again, he shows the indelible nature of sin, and how it recoils upon the third and fourth generation, thus anticipating one of the most marked features in Christian theology. Nay, even involuntary transgressions of the moral law are followed by dire consequences." 3 The truth, is as Mr. Robertson has shown beyond the shadow of a doubt, 4 that Arnold set up an imaginary Hebrew state which had no founda- tion in fact. Again it is hard for an American to understand how Arnold, having espoused the theological position which he took, could remain in the Anglican Church. Even as a young man, as his poetry shows, he broke definitely and finally with the tradition- 2 John M. Robertson develops this point at some length in his "Modern Humanists"; and the same conclusion was arrived at independently by Miss Lois E. Montgomery, a Cornell graduate student who is writing a paper on "Matthew Arnold and Religion." 3 John P. Mahaffy, "Social Life in Greece from Homer to Menander, 4th ed., London, 1879, p. 154. 4 "Modern Humanists," p. 152.