e
impalpable gospel, that we must "_dis_materialise our upper
class, _dis_vulgarise our middle class, _dis_brutalise our
lower class." "Om-m-ject and sum-m-m-ject!" "om-m-ject and
sum-m-m-ject," in short, as that famous flash of Thomas Carlyle's
genius discovered and summarised Coleridge, and with Coleridge the
whole nineteenth century. A screed of jargon--a patter of
shibboleth--and that is all. Never a thought for this momentous
question--"May you not possibly--indeed most probably--in attempting
to remove what you choose to consider as the defects of these classes,
remove also what you acknowledge to be their virtues--the governing
faculty of the upper class, the conduct and moral health of the
middle, the force and vigour of the lower?" A momentous question
indeed, and one which, as some think, has _got_ something of an answer
since, and no comfortable one!

I must apologise, and I do, for anything that may appear too polemical
in this chapter. But the circumstances of the case made it almost as
impossible, as it would have been uninteresting, to be merely
recitative and colourless; and Mr Arnold's own example gives ample
licence. In particular, any one who has had actual and close knowledge
of the actual progress of politics for many years may be pardoned for
speaking with some decision on the practice of sitting at ease in
Zion, and raying out curious observations on Barbarians and Eutrapelia
and the character of Mr Quinion. We may have too little of such things
in English politics--no doubt for a good many years before Mr Arnold's
day we _had_ too little of them. But too much, though a not
unpopular, is a very clumsy and very unscientific antidote to too
little; and in Mr Arnold's own handling of politics, I venture to
think that there was too much of them by a very great deal.

It is very pleasant to turn from the literary results of this period,
from the spectacle of Pegasus

"Stumbling in miry roads of alien art,"

and harnessing himself to all manner of unsuitable vehicles, to the
private history of the decade. This, though sadly chequered by Mr
Arnold's first domestic troubles, was on the whole prosperous, was
somewhat less laborious than the earlier years, and was lightened by
ever more of the social and public distractions, which no man entirely
dislikes, and which--to a certain extent and in a certain way--Mr
Arnold did not dislike at all. The changes of occupation and of
literary aim by the termi