well-understood use of words, Mr. Arnold may be called a clear writer; substantially so in the conception of his ideas and in their communication to others. Every reader of his prose will recall the emphatic manner in which he gives to this quality the first place, as it deserves, in all literary work. He agreed with the old Welshman, Gerald de Barri, "that it is better to be dumb than not to be understood." He wrote all his books, as he wrote "Literature and Dogma," for a "better apprehension" of the subject in hand. He was constantly insisting on "lucidity," and thoroughly believed in it as a "character of perfection" in authorship.

When it is said that Mr. Arnold is a clear writer, this is not to say that he is clear in the same sense in which all other intelligible writers are clear, or that he is similarly clear on all subjects. With rare exceptions, however, he is practically intelligible on subjects capable of being made so, and to intelligent minds disposed to give to his writings a fair degree of thoughtful attention. When Mr. Arnold speaks of "the stream of tendency;" of "the Eternal, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness;" of "righteousness as salvation verifiably;" of the "criticism of life;" and of conduct as "three-fourths of life," we are simply to hold our objections in abeyance until he "comes to himself" and makes us understand his meaning, because he understands it himself. In such vague deliverances as these, we must remember that Mr. Arnold is not at his best, or even at his average

of clearness as a writer. So true is this, that he is often seen to pass to the opposite extreme of overclearness, to an undue repetition of idea and word, until the reader's patience is wearied and his intelligence insulted. Few of our author's admirers have failed to note this blemish, and deplore it. In all this, Mr. Arnold is consistent, and aims thereby to apply a principle which he approvingly quotes from Joubert: "It is by means of familiar words that style takes hold of the reader." Familiar words are not, however, repetitious. The logical elaboration of an idea is not, necessarily, its frequent re-statement. If we examine such an essay as "Culture and Anarchy" or "Literature and Science," with this particular error in mind, surprise will grow into repugnance at the injudicious recurrence of such phrases as "Sweetness and Light;"" the sense in us for conduct;""the sense in us for beauty."

The "long sweep" which the author, in his essay on "Numbers," confesses he has taken in arriving at the point, is a sweep of fifty-six pages, in an article of seventy-one. Clear, beyond a question, this style is, but a little more of that "pregnant conciseness" for which he justly praised Milton, would have been in place, and made a style already intelligible still more decidedly so.

As to the author's style in the line of classical finish, scarcely too much of praise can be said. We come in contact here with the very essence of Mr. Arnold's personality, his supreme devotion to

literary form as an art, to the artistic or æsthetic side of authorship.] Here, again, we find the explanation of his love of Greek letters. He loves them because they are, to his mind, the best human embodiment of the beautiful in language. For this reason, if for no other, he is at home in Athens and with Plato. Hence, his preference of Hellenism to Hebraism; of beauty to sublimity; of sentiment to action. The real Renaissance is to him but the reproduction of this old Attic art; of that "genius and instinct for style" which he finds among the classic authors. Happily for the author, his antecedents and surroundings strongly contributed to this ruling principle. It was a part of his inheritance from his more distinguished father. His training at Rugby and Winchester and Oxford deepened and enlarged it. As professor of poetry at Oxford, he had studied and explained the governing laws of beauty; as a writer of poetry, he had illustrated and applied them; while, in the more didactic department of prose discourse, he ever evinced the presence of this "sense of beauty," and justified the appellation of "the apostle of culture." This he defines to be "a study and pursuit of perfection"; a “passion for perfection"; the final aim of the expression of thought. In choice of word, in structure of phrase and sentence, in unity and symmetry of outline, and in the general procedure of his work, this desire to reach the most consummate excellence of form is a dominant one. If the style is classically clear, it is, even

.

more so, classically finished, and thus made attractive to the most fastidious taste. In this passionate devotion to the structural side of style, there is a danger lurking, and a danger, we are bound to add, which Mr. Arnold has not always escaped. There is here, at times, an over-finish, a finish for its own sake.

Mainly and generally, the style is clear and finished, and, in this sense, classical-a type of prose, partly, the result of his constant communion with Greek and French authors; partly, the result of English training : but, mainly, the result of that inborn "passion for perfection" which goes far to commend to the judgment and taste of cultured readers whatever he was pleased to pen.

II. We have spoken of Mr. Arnold as, above all else, an exponent of literary style. His style may also justly be termed critical and controversial. All his essays might well be called "Essays in Criticism." In his excellent paper on "The Function of Criticism," he gives us the general literary principles which, as he conceived them, lie at the basis of all literary judgment, Land is willing, as an author, to be tested by them.) Criticism he defines to be "a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world." That with which the literary censor has specially to do, is the "criticism of life." If we ask what, in Mr. Arnold's view, the chief con

ditions of successful criticism are, we find them to consist mainly in knowledge and insight. In addition to a large acquaintance with the comprehensive province of letters, there must be that delicacy of literary perception which is above all formal statute, though not unfriendly to it, and which fulfils, in the critic's personality, the practical function of intuitive judgment. (No criticism, he would teach us, is worthy of the name, in which instinct is not greater than logical process; in which quickness of apprehension is not greater than mere acquisition, and where any decision is not known to be valid chiefly because it is seen and felt to be such. The critic, as he adds, is he who "has the faculty of judging with all the powers of his mind and soul at work together." He is the man in his mental and moral entirety absorbed, for the time, in the examination of authorship.

Hence it is that Mr. Arnold has done an invaluable work in minimizing the distance between creation and criticism in literature. Conceding, as he must have done, that the faculty of judging is of lower rank than the purely productive power, he still insists upon magnifying above its present status the judicial function. He sharply rebukes?? his favorite Wordsworth for taking so low a view of the critical art; illustrates the principle he is defending by a reference to Göethe, and is especially severe against that mercenary view of criticism by which it is reduced to the level of the merely practical. Not only is it, in Mr. Arnold's