One has but to contrast such living work as
this with the 'mouldering realm' of Merope
to feel the difference with a sense of pain;

'For doleful are the ghosts, the troops of dead,
Whom Hela with austere control presides';

while this in its plain, heroic completeness
is touched with a stately life that is a pre-
sage of immortality. It is evident, indeed,
that Arnold wrote Balder Dead in his most
fortunate hour, and that Merope is his one
serious mistake in literature. For a genius
thus peculiar and introspective drama-the
presentation of character through action-is
impossible; to a method thus reticent and
severe drama-the expression of emotion in
action-is improper. Not here, O Apollo!'

It is written that none shall bind his brows with the twin laurels of epos and drama. Shakespeare did not, nor could Homer; and how should Matthew Arnold?

HE

E has opinions and the courage of His Prose. them; he has assurance and he has charm; he writes with an engaging clearness. It is very possible to disagree with him; but it is difficult indeed to resist his many

graces of manner, and decline to be entertained and even interested by the variety and quality of his matter. He was described as 'the most un-English of Britons,' the most cosmopolitan of islanders; and you feel as you read him that in truth his mind was French. He took pattern by Goethe, and was impressed by Leopardi; he was judiciously classic, but his romanticism was neither hidebound nor inhuman; he apprehended Heine and Marcus Aurelius, Spinoza and Sainte-Beuve, Joubert and Maurice de Guérin, Wordsworth and Pascal, Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt, Burke and Arthur Clough, Eliza Cook and Homer; he was an authority on education, poetry, civilisation, the Song of Roland, the loveletters of Keats, the Genius of Bottles, the significance of eutrapelos and eutrapelia. In fact, we have every reason to be proud of him. For the present is a noisy and affected age; it is given overmuch to clamorous devotion and extravagant repudiation; there is an element of swagger in all its words and ways; it has a distressing and immoral turn for publicity. Matthew Arnold's function was to protest against its fashions by his own intellectual practice, and now and then

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to take it to task and to call it to order.
He was not particularly original, but he had
in an eminent degree the formative capacity,
the genius of shaping and developing, which
is a chief quality of the French mind and
which is not so common among us English
as our kindest critics would have us believe.
He would take a handful of golden sentences
-things wisely thought and finely said by
persons having authority-and spin them
into an exquisite prelection; so that his
work with all the finish of art retains a
something of the freshness of those elemental
truths on which it was his humour to dilate.
He was, that is to say, an artist in ethics as
in speech, in culture as in ambition. Il est
donné,' says Sainte-Beuve, 'de nos jours, à
un bien petit nombre, même parmi les plus
délicats et ceux qui les apprécient le mieux,
de recueillir, d'ordonner sa vie selon ses
admirations et selon ses goûts, avec suite,'
avec noblesse.' That is true enough; but
Arnold was one of the few, and might 'se
vanter d'être resté fidèle à soi-même, à son
premier et à son plus beau passé.' He was
always a man of culture in the good sense
of the word; he had many interests in life
and art, and his interests were sound and

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liberal; he was a good critic of both morals and measures, both of society and of literature, because he was commonly at the pains of understanding his matter before he began to speak about it. It is therefore not surprising that the part he played was one of considerable importance or that his influence was healthy in the main. He was neither prophet nor pedagogue but a critic pure and simple. Too well read to be violent, too nice in his discernment to be led astray beyond recovery in any quest after strange gods, he told the age its faults and suggested such remedies as the study of great men's work had suggested to him. If his effect was little that was not his fault. He returned to the charge with imperturbable good temper, and repeated his remarks—which are often exasperating in effect with a mixture of mischievousness and charm, of superciliousness and sagacity, and a serene dexterity of phrase, unique in modern letters.

THINK that of all recent books the The two that have pleased me best and Odyssey. longest are those delightful renderings into English prose of the Greek of Homer and Theocritus, which we owe, the one to Messrs. Henry Butcher and Andrew Lang and the other to Mr. Lang's unaided genius. To read this Odyssey of theirs is to have a breath of the clear, serene airs that blew through the antique Hellas; to catch a glimpse of the large, new morning light that bathes the seas and highlands of the young heroic world. In a space of shining and fragrant clarity you have a vision of marble columns and stately cities, of men august in simpleheartedness and strength and women comely and simple and superb as goddesses; and with a music of leaves and winds and waters, of plunging ships and clanging armours, of girls at song and kindly gods discoursing, the sunny-eyed heroic age is revealed in