ndle
it. On this Paul writes: "A noble plea for an education of youth far
more effective than the cursed nonsense of forbidding this or that on
penalty of hell-fire."

Matthew Arnold, whom in some moods he admired, occasionally got on
his nerves. I find this footnote on a page of "Culture and Anarchy":
"This is self-satisfied swank." On another page: "Matthew Arnold
himself often wanting in sweetness and light." On another: "Admirably
put; here I do agree with M. A." He liked Arnold's essay on "The
Function of Criticism," although he differed from some of the author's
judgments. "The French Revolution took a political, practical
character," wrote Arnold; on which my son's comment is: "Surely the
French Revolution was only one aspect of a great world-movement of
liberation! One side of it is Romanticism; another the Revolution
itself; yet another, the Industrial Revolution. No movement has ever a
character _sui generis_." On Joubert's remark: "Force and Right are
the governors of this world, Force till Right is ready," his comment
is: "A regular German theory." Paul's final note on "The Function of
Criticism" reads:

I consider that Matthew Arnold insists too much on the
non-practical element of criticism. After all, it is the lesson
of life that the practical man wins in the end. When we are
brought face to face with the realities of things--as in a war
like the present one--all thought of art and letters simply
vanishes. How is it that the mass of the world is always
inartistic? How is it that the one people in the world--the
Greeks--who built up their State on what Arnold regards as ideal
conditions, collapsed in headlong ruin before the inartistic but
practical Romans?

This comment illustrates one effect of the War on Paul's mind: he was
becoming less of an idealist and more of a realist.

For Mr. W. H. Hudson's "Introduction to the Study of Literature" he
had high esteem. This book he has carefully annotated. Of Mr. Hudson's
remarks on the contrast between the style of Milton and that of
Dryden, between Hooker and Defoe, he writes: "A comparison of
remarkable discernment. The difference between the Miltonic and
Drydenic styles, _i.e._, pre-1660 and post-1660, was simply due to the
change in ideas caused by the reaction against Puritanism." Agreeing
with Hudson that there is much poetry which is prosaic and much prose
which is poetical, he cites as examples: "P