ear with their cadences! Grandiose and moving, they come, those cadences, like the sighing of the wind, through the forest, like the breaking of the waves on the seashore." Passing to the second element of her "spirit," Arnold asks, with the same unwonted poetic heightening of his style, "How should she faint and fail before her time, because of a world out of joint, because of the reign of stupidity, because of the passions of youth-she who could feel so well the power of those eternal consolers, nature and beauty? From the very first they introduce a note of suavity in her strain of grief and passion. Who can forget the lanes and meadows of Valentine?” One can turn to the bitter author of "Empedocles on Etna" and say: Et tu in Arcadia-who can forget the scholar-gipsy's "dark blue-bells drenched with dews of summer eves"? "In all this," Arnold continues, "we are passing from the second element in George Sand to the third,—her aspiration for a social new-birth, a renaissance sociale. It is eminently the ideal of France; it was hers. Her religion connected itself with this ideal.” In developing this last topic the critic is discussing indirectly his own major effort. The weight of his entire experience is in his brief comment on a passage from the novelist's Journal: "All the later work of George Sand, however, all her hope of genuine social renovation, take the simple and serious ground so necessary. 'The cure for

us is far more simple than we will believe. All the better natures among us see it and feel it. It is a good direction given by ourselves to our hearts and consciences;—une bonne direction donnée par nousmêmes à nos cœurs et à nos consciences.'

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To give a good direction to our hearts and consciences-that may appear to many readers in these progressive days a homely and old-fashioned function to be performed by literary criticism; but Arnold was unquestionably very greatly interested in giving that. His character adds weight and importance to his morality. His fine intelligence and pure elevated feeling invest his morality with a winsome beauty. So let a stimulus to the heart and conscience be reckoned with the stimulus to esthetic sensibility and the stimulus to intellectual curiosity as the three vital elements which the reader may expect to find in his essays on criticism.

CHAPTER V

EDUCATION

Comme au temps de Rabelais, c'est la méthode qui résoudra les difficultés.-Notebooks, 116.

La souveraine habilété consiste à bien connaître le prix des choses. Notebooks, 129.

RNOLD'S writing on education, like his poetry,

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derives a good deal of interest from its close relation to the "main movement of mind" in his time. He was what we call nowadays an "educational expert," but one is inclined to say that he was that only incidentally and in a somewhat oldfashioned sense; for there is no smack in him of statistical method, child-psychology, or the deeper mysteries of pedagogy. He writes, to be sure, with extensive knowledge of schools and universities, but he writes like a man of broad general scholarship, like an accomplished man of letters, like an intelligent man of the world, like an alert student of society. In his attention to the means of education he never for an instant forgets the ends. If power had been conferred upon him, he might have been an educational statesman; for he steadily sees his

subject and handles it in full consciousness of its political and social bearings. He has the statesman's sense of the central inevitable drift of things, and the statesman's passion for steering the drift.

What first reconciled him to his inspectorship of schools was his perception that the education of the people was to be one of the big tasks of his day. At the very outset of his career he was tremendously impressed by his conviction that the government of England was not much longer to remain in the hands of a cultivated aristocracy. The extension of the franchise from 1832 onward meant the coming into political power of first the middle and then the lower classes. The political emergence of the artisan, the shopkeeper, and the "common laborer" made the educational question appear to Arnold a remarkably "live issue." Since he regarded this emergence as irresistible, it seemed to him imperative to prepare for it. It seemed to him, for political reasons if for no other, imperative with all possible speed to educate the democracy. Carlyle told the governing class that in extending the suffrage to fools they were rushing straight to destruction-they were "shooting Niagara." Arnold, equally anxious but more resourceful, said that if intelligent people did not wish their political destinies dictated by the ignorant masses they must in a thoroughgoing fashion regenerate and enlighten the masses. He felt, furthermore, that the need for

regeneration and enlightenment was not confined to the masses.

To the solution of the grand problems of the educational statesman-what to do, and how to do it -he contributed in three distinct ways. In the first place, as inspector of schools he supplied to the Education Department careful reports on the existing system of elementary education in England-the training of teachers, the proficiency of pupils, the text-books and methods in vogue, the effect of government grants to local boards, and kindred matters; his nineteen General Reports were collected and published in 1889. In the second place, he prepared for the Education Commissioners and for the public elaborate reports on Continental systems of education: The Popular Education of France with Notices of That in Holland and Switzerland, 1861; French Eton; or Middle Class Education and the State, 1864; Schools and Universities on the Continent, 1868; Higher Schools and Universities in Germany, 1874; and a Special Report on . Elementary Education in Germany, Switzerland, and France, 1888. In the third place, he set forth, in these reports and elsewhere in his works, his own ideas of educational administration and organization, and the choice of studies. The special student will find all these writings full of matter and suggestiveness. The descriptive portions, however, have now mainly an historical interest, and we shall

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