and incapacity for telling the truth. What is truth but some definite person's impression formed at some definite point of view? "Name the person and the point of view," says the cynic, "and I shall know how to value his 'truth.'" Arnold, a seeker for truth, bows to the impressionists and acknowledges the tantalizing "relativity" of our knowledge in the preface to his first series of Essays in Criticism: "To try and approach truth on one side after another, not to strive or cry, nor to persist in pressing forward, on any one side, with violence and selfwill, it is only thus, it seems to me that mortals may hope to gain any vision of the mysterious Goddess, whom we shall never see except in outline, but only thus even in outline." He, too, would agree that the value of "truth" depends upon the perceiver and the point of view.

To indicate Arnold's point of view is therefore x fundamental to our consideration of his criticism. His culture had given him a strong sense of the community of the civilized world; in literary matters he was an avowed cosmopolitan. "Let us conceive," he says in his essay on Wordsworth, "of the whole group of civilized nations as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working towards a common result; a confederation whose members have a due knowledge both of the past, out of which they all proceed, and of one another. This was the ideal

of Goethe, and it is an ideal which will impose itself upon the thoughts of our modern societies more and more." Taken together, these two passages sufficiently indicate Arnold's position: We can not attain absolute truth; but by taking civilized humanity as our center we can at least avoid the errors due to \political, religious, national, or racial partisanship.

To seek the absolute truth, not in this world to behold it face to face, but to press steadily nearer to it, this, as he understands it, is the sovereign business of criticism. In his important essay, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," he enforces the idea in a series of memorable definitions. The first of these seems cold, dispassionate, disinterested, like the purest aspirations of the "scientific spirit": "It is the business of the critical power ... to see the object as in itself it really is." Lest this offend the "relativists," he follows it up with the qualification that the critical power never quite completes its business: "It tends to establish an order of ideas, if not absolutely true, yet true by comparison with that which it displaces; to make the best ideas prevail. Presently these ideas reach society, the touch of truth is the touch of life, and there is a stir and growth everywhere; out of this stir and growth come the creative epochs of literature."

1 An earlier formulation of this idea occurs in "The Function of Criticism," Essays in Criticism, First Series, N. Y., 1903, p. 39.

Criticism's positive and fructifying element he emphasizes in a second definition of its function: "Its business is simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas." To this, probably the most frequently quoted, formulation of its mission he adds a third: its "best spiritual work" is "to keep man from a self-satisfaction which is retarding and vulgarizing, to lead him towards perfection, by making his mind dwell upon what is excellent in itself, and the absolute beauty and fitness of things." By this time, one will observe, Arnold has passed far beyond the cold dispassionate curiosity "to see the object as in itself it really is." Criticism's supreme object is still truth; but criticism now glows with esthetic and ✓ moral passion, is responsible, interested, purposeful, devoted to the advancement of human welfare. Yet as Arnold understands the matter the third definition is, so to speak, an implication of the firstseek first the kingdom of truth, and all these other things shall be added unto you.

Abstractly considering, no sensible being can object to the operations of a force so benignant. It is only when the current of "true and fresh ideas" scatters the musty straw in which we have made our beds and disturbs the slumber of our old habits and our settled prejudices that we grow uneasy. Arnold, knowing that his readers will assent without reflec

tion unless he a little offends their sensibilities, names, with deliberately irritating iteration of the charge, some of the most ancient and honored organs of British opinion as offenders against the new critical spirit of which he is the spokesman: "What is the bane of criticism in this country? It is that × practical considerations cling to it and stifle it. It subserves interests not its own. Our organs of criticism are organs of men and parties having practical ends to serve, and with them those practical ends are the first thing and the play of mind the second; so much play of mind as is compatible with the prosecution of those ends is all that is wanted.

We have the Edinburgh Review, existing as an organ of the old Whigs, and for as much play of the mind as may suit its being that; we have the Quarterly Review, existing as an organ of the Tories, and for as much play of the mind as may suit its being that; we have the British Quarterly Review, existing as an organ of the political Dissenters, and for as much play of the mind as may suit its being that; we have the Times, existing as an organ of the common, satisfied, well-to-do Englishman, and for as much play of mind as may suit its being that." These organs of partisan opinion we shall no doubt always have with us; "but it would be well, too, that there should be a criticism, not the minister of these interests, not their enemy, but absolutely and entirely independent of them.”

Arnold develops this idea in his essay on "The Literary Influence of Academies." Precisely because his criticism is not cold and detached and absolutely disinterested but human and social and passionate, he is not contented with a mere knowledge of the best; he is bent upon making the best prevail + in society, and he turns, inquiringly, to the Academy as an instrument for accomplishing this purposefor making the best authoritative. The occasion for his illuminating discussion was offered by a new edition of Pellison and D'Olivet's history of the French Academy. Reading this work causes Arnold to reflect upon the absence of any such institution in England. "A thousand voices," he says, "will be ready to tell us that this absence is a signal mark of our national superiority; that it is in great part owing to this absence that the exhilarating words of Lord Macaulay, lately given to the world by his very clever nephew, Mr. Trevelyan, are so profoundly true: 'It may safely be said that the literature now extant in the English language is of far greater value than all the literature which three hundred years ago was extant in all the languages of the world together.' .'” “I daresay this is so;" continues Arnold with his characteristic insinuating irony, "only, remembering Spinoza's maxim that the two great banes of humanity are self-conceit and the laziness coming from self-conceit, I think it may do us good, instead of resting in our pre-eminence with