(3) That such indigent aliens as do arrive are not found to burden the ratepayers to any appreciable extent.

(4) That no system of practicable restrictive legislation could be invented to exclude them.

(5) That the indigent alien has been a source of profit rather than of loss to the native worker.

(6) That in respect of two distinct branches of trade the community has derived benefit from their presence.

STEPHEN N. Fox.

NOTE. Since the above remarks were in print the writer has had the opportunity of hearing the evidence given by certain selected witnesses of Russian and Polish origin, produced by Mr. White before the Immigration. Committee. All these witnesses had recently arrived in England; and, with one exception, were anxious to proceed to America, nor did any of them appear to be utterly destitute of resources.-S. N. F.

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

CRIT

YRITICS are, perhaps, the only people in the world who do not need the advice addressed in the proverbial lore of more than one language to the physician. To call upon a critic to criticize himself would be quite superfluous. They are always doing it, in the act of criticizing others. At the same time they deserve no credit for it, as the operation is wholly unconscious, and for the most part absolutely involuntary. It has been liberally performed all round in the various obituary reviews of Mr. Matthew Arnold's literary genius and work, and no doubt a fresh example of it is about to be afforded to whoever shall read what I am about to write. No observer of the literary firmament can prevent "personal equation" intruding into his efforts to fix the exact places of its celestial occupants. The best one can hope is to reduce the subjective element of error within as small dimensions as possible. It would, at any rate, be out of the question to hope for more than this in the case of Mr. Arnold. His work, both in prose and poetry, but in the former especially, was distinguished by characteristics of the strongest individuality; it displayed qualities which are as much overrated by some minds as they are depreciated by others; it enforced doctrines-the prose by precept, the poetry by example-on the soundness of which men have differed since the dawn of literature, and will probably continue to differ until literature is extinguished by Volapuk. To have reasoned opinions on literature at all is to hold strong convictions, or at any rate to feel strongly, on the questions which Matthew Arnold's genius and teaching raised as with a standing challenge, and the critic who undertakes to review his literary work can hardly but be conscious of doing so from the standpoint, either of a convinced believer in his doctrines and method, or of a heretic hardened in

their rejection. Such a one ought, perhaps, to be aware, therefore, that, in endeavouring to appraise the work of the departed poet and essayist, he runs a risk of supplying his readers with little else than an edifying disclosure of his own orthodoxy or heterodoxy from the Arnoldian point of view on the theories in question. It says much for the artless simplicity of the critical guild that this apprehension seems to weigh so little on their minds. Those who have adopted, equally with those who dissent from, Mr. Arnold's canons of art have in many instances assigned him his place in English literature with a noble unconsciousness of the fact that they have been merely sitting in judgment upon, and with judicial gravity deciding in favour of, their own prepossessions.

Mutely submitting to the obvious retort that I am about to afford an example of the precise foible in my own person, I propose at the outset to examine the comparative estimate of Mr. Arnold's poetic and prose work which has been formed and enunciated by the majority of his posthumous critics.

I

Now, the first reflection which suggests itself on this point might well be one of a somewhat painful character. It is only my intimate personal conviction that no such thing as a literary counterpart of Mrs. Candour is, or ever was, to be found among us-it is only this, say, which assures me of the good faith and good nature of many of the obituary eulogies which I have read. "It is as a poet rather than as a prose-essayist," runs the "common form " of the eulogist, "that Mr. Arnold will be remembered;" and then the writer goes on to say -not "in the same breath;" he usually respires for two or three sentences before adding it—that "to the great body of his countrymen Mr. Arnold as a poet is almost unknown." He will be remembered, it seems, for those achievements which have failed to attract the attention of the public which is to remember him. Sometimes, it is true, the formula has been varied a little, to the advantage of logic; and we have been told that the works which failed to make Mr. Arnold known to the mass of his contemporaries will constitute his principal "claim " to the "remembrance of posterity." The critics who prefer this phrase are careful not to commit themselves to the assertion that posterity will honour a draft which an earlier generation had returned on the hands of the drawer marked with the fatal superscription "no effects."

I am not so rash as to dispute the proposition that the poet was unknown to all but a very small fraction of those who were familiar enough with the name of the literary critic, the essayist on politics and manners, and, above all, perhaps, the amateur theologian. Indeed, the facts and dates of the matter speak for themselves. It is considerably more than thirty years since Mr. Arnold published his first two volumes of poems-volumes which contain some of his best

work. Fifteen or sixteen years had passed before his "Essays in Criticism" made their appearance, and it is safe to say that at that time very few, even of those who were sufficiently struck with the contents of his book to take the trouble to get its title correctly (the varia lectio "on" has not yet disappeared even from library catalogues), had made as much as a bowing acquaintance with Mr. Arnold's earlier muse, or had ever read a line of the "New Poems" which had seen the light a year or so before. It was undoubtedly the "Essays Essays" that established his fame with that great world which can be persuaded by "persistent hammering," as the author of "Our Noble Selves" has it, to read and to admire the excellent in prose, but not, or very, very rarely, the exquisite in verse. This great world was brought to perceive, or to take for granted, in default of percipient power, that here was a critic, not only of rare technical ability, but one possessed of original and fertilizing conceptions on the subject of the critic's art, and the master, above all, of a style which, whatever fault might be found with it on other grounds, had become in his hands an instrument of marvellous delicacy and power. Then the great world condescended to see what this remarkable essayist and critic had written in rhyme and metre. And in the course of time they had got by heart the last eighteen lines of "Sohrab and Rustum" and the handsome compliment to Sophocles at the end of the sonnet "To a Friend," and the description of our Titan of empire, laden with "the too vast orb of his fate," and a few other elegant extracts of an equally convenient and portable kind.

But the great world never got farther than that. They still continued, and they still continue, to prefer their “favourites ”—the two or three poets who have won their way to or beyond the place occupied for so many years in lonely majesty, like the broken column of Ozymandias, by the author of "Proverbial Philosophy." They still prized, and prize above all others, the three bards whom they have respectively learned to love, been persuaded to admire, and taken at once and spontaneously to their hearts-Lord Tennyson, Mr. Browning, and Mr. Lewis Morris. And since Mr. Arnold as a poet and Mr. Arnold's poems were and are in this position in the mind of the general public at the time of and since his lamented death, it follows that, to declare, as has been declared in so much recent criticism, that his future fame will depend upon his poetry, must mean one of two things: either it is a polite way of saying that Mr. Arnold is not destined to any future life at all in the popular recollection, or it amounts to a prediction that, sooner or later, the appreciation, now confined to a few, of his high excellence as a poet, will, as in the case of his master, Wordsworth, dawn gradually upon the perceptions of the great body of his countrymen. It is possible that Mr. Arnold himself entertained some expectation

of the kind, and that his avowed belief in the continuing growth of Wordsworth's fame and influence was associated with a personal hope which would certainly not be unjustifiable on the part of one so deeply imbued with the Wordsworthian spirit as himself.

It is ill dogmatizing on a question so obviously incapable of more than a conjectural answer as this. No man's opinion as to what the public taste of ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years hence will be in the matter of poetry, can be worth much more than that of his neighbours; and, for all we know, the world may be reading Matthew Arnold with eager delight a century hence, while Mr. Lewis Morris may have long sunk into neglect. The utmost one can say is that it is difficult to detect at present any forerunning sign whatever of either development of the public taste. I see no reason to doubt that poets who display Mr. Morris's triumphant address in adapting themselves to the poetical likings of so vast a multitude of their fellow-countrymen will always find innumerable admirers worthy of them. I do not believe that the singer will either get ahead of the listener or the listener of the singer, but that the two will be kept abreast of each other by the link of a quality which Horace, though with a slight difference of application, has described as "golden." On the other hand, I do not find any very convincing ground for the belief that the taste of any great multitudes of men in this or any other country will ever be powerfully attracted by poetry like that of Mr. Arnold. Even if the influence of Wordsworth should increase, instead of, as is at least as probable, diminishing, it does not follow that Mr. Arnold's would obtain additional acceptance on that account: for Wordsworth's appeal to the common mind is largely dependent upon a quality in his poetry which Mr. Arnold's is altogether without. Wordsworth lays firm hold of the religious instinct in man. His poetry, for all the mystical nature-worship that pervades it, was allied to a strongly and even almost narrowly personal Theistic creed. There is nothing in the poetry of his disciple to supply the place of this element, except that highly attenuated conception of the "Something not ourselves which makes for righteousness," so familiar to every student of the amateur theologian into which the poet and critic so unfortunately declined. It will be a long time before the mass of mankind are willing to accept the "stream of tendency" as a substitute for their no doubt crude and self-contradictory conceptions of a personal Creator; and when, if ever, they do, they will probably have ceased to care for poetry of the Wordsworthian and Arnoldian type at all. Science relieved by sensuousness appears to be the ideal to which not only poetry, but art of all kinds, is tending at the present day, and if the movement is a real and persistent, and not a merely apparent or merely temporary one, the ultimate effect of that movement must be to crowd out all poetry set mainly in the contemplative key, to what