Florence Earle Coates

“ Newman may stand for much that is valuable, for much that is appealing, lofty, spiritual, beautiful, but unless by "faith" we mean the abdication of the throne of intelligence, in a voluntary subordination to visible authority, for faith he may not stand.
"No man can be great," says Emerson, "who is not a nonconformist," and certain it is that in their generation the greatest have been accounted heretics, and as heretics condemned. The doubt of to-day becomes the faith of to-morrow, and "incredulity," as Aristotle tells us, "is the beginning of wisdom." ”

“ Of men of culture Emerson remarks that, upon coming together, they do not straightway fall to discussing the problems which chiefly engross them, but choose rather to speak of the weather, the crops, and topics of a kindred and every-day interest. Only a poseur is always effective; he has a little speech ready for each occasion, and remembers constantly that he is in the eye of the world. Men like Arnold and Browning fail to realize that more is expected of them than to be themselves ”

“ Holding with Bishop Butler that "religion after all is nothing if it is not true," he believed that our faith should at least rest upon foundations which are verifiable; and for these foundations he looked within, finding in the sense of right and wrong in man—in the Ought, the mysterious Thou shalt, which we name the voice of duty—what seemed to him irrefutable evidence of an enduring power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness! In other words, he believed that we may verify God, may assure ourselves as to the Eternal who cares for, and who demands of us, righteousness. ”

“ And in this connection we have Arnold's own testimony. Of Emerson he says:
Yes, truly, his insight is admirable; his truth is precious. Yet the secret of his effect is not in these; it is in his temper. It is in the hopeful, serene, beautiful temper wherewith these, in Emerson, are indissolubly joined. He says himself: "We judge of a man's wisdom by his hope, knowing that the perception of the inexhaustibleness of nature is an immortal youth." ”

“ To know that we know that which we know, and to know that we do not know that which we do not know—that is true knowledge. Matthew Arnold had a fondness for knowing that which he knew, and he disliked what he termed "men's insane license of affirmation about God"—their way of talking of him as of "a magnified and non-natural man in the next street." ”

“ Culture,—the sentiment for beauty, the passion for perfection, "the acquaintance with the best that has been thought and said in the world,"—this he deemed the remedy for the unideaed frivolity of the barbarian, the arid, self-complacent dullness of the Philistine, the hopeless intellectual squalor of the populace. ”

“ Men of genius are not replaced, and if, dying, they leave their work half done, the loss is irreparable. But Arnold's message was delivered, whether in verse or prose, with an amplitude and distinctness to which few messages may lay claim, and is "full of foretastes of the morrow."
Wordsworth expressed regret that the critics found so much fault with his poetry, because, as he remarked with Olympian simplicity, "They deprive the youth of my country of what would be a blessing to them." ”

“ There are melodies the full sweetness of which the ear immediately seizes. But who that is a musician does not learn to distrust their facile charm, knowing the tendency of too-easy strains to become, after frequent repetition, tame, if not wearisome?
In all art it is the same. The most lasting is rarely first to captivate. Great symphonies require more than one hearing; great poems more than one reading. ”

“ Life was not to him, as to so many, a series of sorrowful frustrations. He had ability equal to every task imposed; and with his simple tastes and inexhaustible interests, it would have been easy for him to live in the enjoyment of a home wholly congenial, writing, amidst temperate scenes beloved, poetry and criticism which should not die. ”

“ One should try to bring oneself to regard death as a quite natural event, and surely in the case of the old it is not difficult to do this. For my part, since I was sixty, I have regarded each year, as it ended, as something to the good beyond what I could naturally have expected. This summer in America I began to think that my time was really coming to an end—I had so much pain in my chest, the sign of a malady which had suddenly struck down in middle life, long before they came to my present age, both my father and grandfather. ”

“ Philistia has come to be thought by us the true Land of Promise, and it is anything but that; the born lover of ideas, the born hater of commonplaces, must feel in this country that the sky over his head is of brass and iron.
Nor is a true devotion more marked in his praise than in the temper with which he answers the critics of his nation's faults ”

“ Those to whom his writings are undoubtedly known, even where their prejudices lead them to feel that one holding his heretical opinions should be gloomy, hopeless, sad, admit that he was not so, and bear ready witness to his buoyancy, to the high courage and cheerfulness with which, under conditions the most adverse and dispiriting, "he onward fared, by his own heart inspired." Of his verse Richard Holt Hutton remarks: "It is this sense of pure refreshment in Nature, this calm amid feverish strife, this dew after hot thought, that determines the style of his studies of Nature. ”

“ He recommended men to read it, not as a miraculous and talismanic book, but as the best account of the spiritual life of that people who, of all the peoples of the earth, had the greatest genius for conduct—the clearest intuitions concerning the Eternal who loveth righteousness. Conduct he estimated as three fourths of life, and he held with the prophet Micah, that "To do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly" is to fulfil the requirement of the Eternal. O ye that love the Eternal, see that ye hate the thing which is evil! ”

“ I know of no picture of Newman so winning, so altogether gracious, as that at the beginning of the lecture on Emerson.
Faith and doubt are dangerous terms, readily interchangeable, and requiring at each recurrence to be freshly defined. That Matthew Arnold had "doubts," there can be no question. But how was he singular in this regard? Had the author of Job no doubts? Had Milton, Goethe, Coleridge, Heine, Shelley, Kingsley, Clough, Tennyson, Emerson, no doubts? Had Newman himself no doubts? ”

“ To most of us there come moments of like spiritual lassitude when, wearied in the conflict, we long for like relief; when, the whole head sick, and the whole heart faint, we would gladly fling ourselves upon the bosom of an infallible Church which should bid us think no more. ”

“ He had thought of little Greece and little England, and had realized that races, like individuals, are developed by adversity; and he had felt that in our strength there lay a weakness; in our extent, our numbers, and our wealth, a menace to our future. ”

“ A democrat by conviction rather than by temperament, urging democracy as "the only method consistent with the human instinct toward expansion," he was yet an educator, and believed in equality upon a high, not upon a low, plane. Like Ruskin, he demanded of men their best, and with less than their best refused to be satisfied. ”

“ In this connection, it is interesting to remember that of modern men of genius Matthew Arnold's favorite was John Henry Newman. Many will recall the noble and characteristic sentences which open the lecture on Emerson; wherein, recalling the days when he was an undergraduate at Oxford, Arnold declares, "Voices were in the air there which haunt my memory still," "Happy the man who in that susceptible season of youth hears such voices! They are a possession to him forever." ”

“ That there is no via media in the service of truth, Newman perfectly realized. "My battle," he wrote, "is with liberalism—scarcely now a party; it is the educated lay world." Naturally for him the appeals of truth sounded fainter, and because of his doubts, and the intolerable burden of them, he fled to Rome, finding rest beneath the ægis of authority. ”

“ A recent writer, in speaking of these two sonnets, says, "There may be better poetry in the English language, but there are no better sermons." Whatever our differences of opinion, it must be admitted that Matthew Arnold was always, and clearly, on the side of religion, virtue, and the ideal. The last years of his life he devoted to the salvation of men from their doubts, and some he saved. ”

“ It should perhaps not seem strange that since his death there has been manifest in certain quarters a desire to lessen the influence of Arnold by emphasizing in him the quality of unbelief. "Truth provokes those whom she does not convert," and we are slow to forgive the disturbers of our doctrine. Still, it becomes us to acquaint ourselves with the character of the unbelief we condemn, remembering that it is St. ”

“ Of the too vast orb of her fate.
"It is impossible," says a recent writer, "for any sane person who knows England, and who knows America, to read Matthew Arnold's exposition of the English character, and say that it is in the main untrue." For ourselves, we may deplore, not that he criticized us, but that one so exceptionally qualified had not the opportunity of knowing and of telling us more as to our defects. ”