really profit the nation, or give it what it needs.”  Perhaps; but suppose we ask for a little reason, just a ghost of a premiss or two for this extensive conclusion?  There is no voice, neither any that answers.  And then, the Tories dismissed with a wave to all but temporary oblivion (they are to be allowed, it seems, to appear from time to time to chasten Liberalism), our prophet turns to Liberalism itself.  It ought to promote “the humanisation of man in society,” and it doesn’t promote this.  Ah! what a blessed word is “humanisation,” the very equivalent, in syllables as in blessedness, of “Mesopotamia”!  But when for the considerable rest of the essay we try to find out what humanisation is, why we find nothing but the old negative impalpable gospel, that we must “dismaterialise our upper class, disvulgarise our middle class, disbrutalise our lower class.”  “Om-m-ject and sum-m-m-ject!” “om-m-ject and sum-m-m-ject,” in short, as that famous flash of Thomas Carlyle’s genius discovered and summarised Coleridge, and with Coleridge the whole nineteenth century.  A screed of jargon—­a patter of shibboleth—­and that is all.  Never a thought for this momentous question—­“May you not possibly—­indeed most probably—­in attempting to remove what you choose to consider as the defects of these classes, remove also what you acknowledge to be their virtues—­the governing faculty of the upper class, the conduct and moral health of the middle, the force and vigour of the lower?” A momentous question indeed, and one which, as some think, has got something of an answer since, and no comfortable one!

I must apologise, and I do, for anything that may appear too polemical in this chapter.  But the circumstances of the case made it almost as impossible, as it would have been uninteresting, to be merely recitative and colourless; and Mr Arnold’s own example gives ample licence.  In particular, any one who has had actual and close knowledge of the actual progress of politics for many years may be pardoned for speaking with some decision on the practice of sitting at ease in Zion, and raying out curious observations on Barbarians and Eutrapelia and the character of Mr Quinion.  We may have too little of such things in English politics—­no doubt for a good many years before Mr Arnold’s day we had too little of them.  But too much, though a not unpopular, is a very clumsy and very unscientific antidote to too little; and in Mr Arnold’s own handling of politics, I venture to think that there was too much of them by a very great deal.

It is very pleasant to turn from the literary results of this period, from the spectacle of Pegasus

  “Stumbling in miry roads of alien art,”