the revolutionary leaders in the Principality she has reached the topmost heights of self-mastery; but no Government can long hold out against its whole people and army combined.

Turkey cannot bestow reformswhich, if genuine, would cost her nearly three of her best provinces-without a war which could hardly cost her more. Policy no less than dignity bids her make a stand. Indeed the issues are so simple and clear that the ExGrand Vizier, Said Pasha, advised the Sultan to set his face against the proposed innovations in Macedonia-supposing them to be serious-and to chastise Bulgaria instead. Abdul Hamid, who would gladly follow the wellmeant advice if he dared, unwillingly discharged his trusty counsellor and set his successor to work on the insoluble problem.

Meanwhile, on the one hand, troops are being massed in Macedonia in ever increasing numbers-over 100 battalions, many of them redifs, are already The Contemporary Review.

stationed there-while, on the other, Hilmi Pasha is hard at work "reforming"-introducing a scene from an opera-bouffe into one of the most harrowing tragedies of European history. The best Turkish generals have been. appointed to the chief strategic positions in the country; Ali Riza Pashawho served for several years in the Prussian army and will probably be commander-in-chief in the future war -is at the head of the province of Monastir and Mehmed Hafiz in Ueskub. The south frontier of Bulgaria is being threatened by the Turks; that of Turkey is no longer menaced by the Bulgarians. The Greek Cabinet is uneasy but hopeful. The Servian Government has called up its recruits somewhat earlier than usual; rifles and guns are being hurriedly purchased, and "satisfactory explanations" given all round. Meanwhile Europe, nay all Christendom, is anxiously awaiting the ides of March.

E. J. Dillon.

There are many classes of men with whose inner life the public has no concern. The actor whom we admire, the lawyer who does our business, the stockbroker who invests our savings, each may be saint or worldling, and it is nothing to us. But the priest, the preacher, the poet, the nobler sort of artist, are in an altogether different position. We are not unjust enough to forget that the sermon that impressed us, the poem or picture that moved us, is the record of a "best and happiest moment," as Shelley said, and that the sea of the spirit has its tides, like the other, and cannot always stay at high water. But we still inevitably feel that the man who takes upon himself to be a teacher or inspirer of his generation in these highest ways has given us hostages which only his own character can redeem. Ut servetur veritas praedicandi, teneatur necesse est altitudo vivendi. We cannot but demand that with all inequalities of mood and moment, a man's life should be a whole, not an assemblage of unreconciled and discordant parts. In life, as in art, it must be the circumstances in which the character is placed, not the character itself, that present the irreconcilable opposition. The character must have an inner and essential unity, which no outward and occasion

No. 6

al diversity can obliterate. And so, in the case of a poet who has stirred the heart and soul of his generation, the stream of his public utterances may move on its way in the sight of all men, filling the plain, making straight for the goal; the secret current of his inner life may be small and weak, blocked by obstacle after obstacle, turned again and again out of its course; yet we feel that we have a right to expect that, however feeble and obscure and devious, it should be at least moving in the same direction, and seeking the same goal as the other.

It is something of this inner revelation that these Notebooks give us in the case of Matthew Arnold. He who was all his life preaching to others is here shown preaching to himself. And certainly if he made no slight or easy demands on the intellect and the character of his readers, he is yet higher and sterner in his demands upon himself.

He whom his critics called a "bellelettristic trifler," and who smilingly accepted the description, is seen here as he really was underneath, in the nakedness of his soul. We cannot but be reminded of his own sonnet, the Austerity of Poetry. Like the bride of Giacopone di Todi, like the Muse of

Poetry of whom her story made him think, he himself often appeared,

Radiant, adorned outside;

the world knew him so, and rejoiced in the knowledge; but, in his case too, as in that of the Italian bride, Death, the revealer, shows us

a hidden ground Of thought and of austerity within.

We can now judge between those who looked on him as a cultivated trifler, and those who saw in him, before all things, a moralist, a liver of life in the light of eternity. No one could keep such a book as this for more than thirty years without meaning a great deal by it. It is the record, as plainly to be read as if it had been a journal, of what was most individual and essential in his nature. And it shows that the real man, in the most secret chambers of his soul, in the unseen life of every day, was akin to nothing lower than the very highest moments of his poetry.

The book by which his daughter has earned the warm gratitude of all who love her father's work and memory gives us the notes complete, as Arnold made them, for the first years, 18521861, during which the books were kept, and then for every fifth year from 1863 to 1888, the year in which he died. There are also some lists of books he set down to be read in certain years, with those he actually read struck out. Mrs. Wodehouse has contributed a preface, and, for illustrations, she has given us a facsimile page of one of the original notebooks, and a reproduction of the well-known photograph of the poet. The books, in which the notes were written, were diaries of the most ordinary kind, intended for the insertion only of engagements, which was, in fact, the primary purpose for which Arnold used them.

The space allotted to each day is only about three inches by one, so that, as a rule, only one of his citations could be written in it, and the longer ones must have covered the space of several days. The names of the authors cited are sometimes given, but as often omitted: sometimes they are represented by initials: full references to chapter, page, or line are hardly ever given. The passages noted are in various languages: Greek, Latin, Italian, French, and German, as well as English. Very few, if any, are original reflections of the poet's own; they are sentences or passages suggested by his reading or his memory. Most of them are easily identified, the books most frequently quoted being the Imitation, given sometimes in Latin, and sometimes in English, and the Bible, which is often quoted in Greek as well as from the Vulgate and the English Version.

Some of the initials are obvious; one or two I cannot recognize. G. is of course Goethe; G. S., George Sand; B., Bunsen; C., Cicero. But whether J. de M. is always Joseph de Maistre, R. always Renan, and V. Vinet, I am not sure. The authors cited range from very great names to very insignificant ones. Among them are Goethe, who appears frequently, Pindar, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Cicero, Lucan, Dante, Leopardi, Lessing, Heine, Vauvenargues, Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Renan, Condorcet, Littré, La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, Sénancour, Bishop Wilson and Bishop Butler, Barrow, Burke, Clarendon, Paley, Johnson. Practically the whole book is taken from writers of this rank, but there are a small number of curiously insignificant entries, such as this from the Pall Mall Gazette: "The French could not act differently, if they had determined to chill the enthusiastic admiration and sympathy with which the Republic was regarded on this side of the Chan

nel." But these are extremely few, and the difficulty of reading the book lies rather in its giving us too much, and not too little, to stop and think about. It is far from being a monotonous book: indeed, the list of its sources just quoted is proof enough of its variety. It is a confession of the whole man, his seriousness and belief in conduct, his intelligence and belief in mind, his imagination and belief in beauty. Everything that was in him finds its reflection, everything, perhaps, except his delightful humor. For that there was no room here; for this is a book of his needs. It exhibits the efforts he called upon himself every day to make, and humor lives without effort, where it lives at all. What he is doing here is what he all his life called upon the public more than anything else to do: to use books not as the idlest of amusements, nor as a means of purposeless learning, but as what he was so profoundly convinced the best books can be, an unfailing fountain of strength and of consolation; to realize that much time given to reading can only justify itself when it does not forget the grave question of Epictetus: "Is not the reading of books a preparation for life?" But it must be the whole of life; and the value of this book lies in its being at once one of the very finest books of

⚫ devotion issued in England for many years and so much besides that is the very opposite of ordinary books of devotion. Angelica hilaritas cum monastica simplicitate, says one of its notes. Well, there is not certainly much hilarity, either angelic or human, in the book; that, as I have said, was not in its plan. But how much there is in it which monastic simplicity, even when that simplicity was saintliness, nearly always lacked, and for want of which the saints of the Middle Age often seem one-sided, maimed, and almost inhuman; so that the larger life of to

day is apt to feel impatiently that to be with them is to be enclosed behind narrowing nunnery walls, where to breathe and move are difficult, to grow impossible. Arnold's desire rightly to renounce the world did not make him for a moment put aside his desire rightly to understand it; and he never made the mistake of fancying that the way to increase his spiritual stature was to dwarf his intellect.

Yet, to take that devotional element first, not a monk of them all can choose sterner texts for his daily meditation than this poet and man of the world. People who saw only the weaker side of his studies in religion were apt to think of him as diluting Christianity into a kind of sentiment, half philosophic and half poetic. Yet what we find here is that the things most quoted from the Gospels are the things most uniquely and sternly Christian. Those tremendous sayings, which so few of us dare really face, "Whosoever will save his life, shall lose it," "Whosoever taketh not up his cross, and cometh after me, he cannot be my disciple," are just the texts that he set down to have before him, again and again. And the favorite things from the Imitation are also the most distinctively Christian. The way of selfdenial, which is not the way of any philosophy but the way of the Cross alone, is the most frequent of the subjects chosen. "Non est alia via ad vitam, et ad veram internam pacem, nisi via sanctae crucis, et quotidianae mortificationis;" "soli servi crucis inveniunt viam beatitudinis, et verae lucis;" "quanto quisque plus sibi moritur, tanto magis Deo vivere incipit;" "utinam per unum diem bene essemus conversati in hoc mundo;" "vae nobis, si volumus declinare ad quietem, quasi jam pax sit et securitas, cum necdum appareat vestigium verae sanctitatis in conversatione nostrâ;" these, and such as these, breathing just what was most

intimate, secret, and unique in the Christian message, occur again and again year after year. Few testimonies to the solitary greatness of the Imitation can be more remarkable than this of Matthew Arnold, looking on all questions of life, both creed and practice, from a point of view so very different to that of a medieval monk, and yet finding just here in this monk's communings with himself the best sort of food on which to wage his so different daily warfare.

But though he touches mediævalism in this way, he has nothing whatever of its turn for idle speculation, or its taste for morbid introspection or luxuriant mysticism. He passes away from it with its own "Ecce labora et noli contristari," and plunges into the daily struggle of an active life. No one knows better than he the need and value of solitude; but his solitude must be an oasis in the desert of the world, not a desert of inactivity with an oasis of action here and there. He will note with Lacordaire "se retirer en soi et en Dieu est la plus grande force qui soit au monde;" and realize to the full that "un homme se fait en dedans de lui, et non en dehors;" and his poems again and again show that he is aware that, in our bustling, hurrying generation, the worst of all states is that of those who, in a round of external activities, "Fancy that they put forth all their life, And never know how with the soul it fares." Yet it is the other lesson that he more often presses on himself, "Ein unnütz Leben ist ein früher Tod," is an entry that occurs again and again; and it is reduced to definite daily practice by the still more frequent "Semper aliquid certi proponendum est." His ideal for himself is "une vie laborieuse, une succession de travaux qui remplissent et moralisent nos jours;" and these must be matter of definite choice, selecting some, rejecting others, and bringing all to bear

on that "fin voulue et désintéressée," which, differing in each man, is for each man the condition of all growth.

I suppose there is no doubt what that end was in the case of Matthew Arnold. Few lives have had a clearer unity than his. His private character, his poetry, his criticism, his official career, all seem to have kept the same kind of goal before them. In every one of them he was an educationist. For himself as well as for others, he believed in the urgent importance of taking steps to arrive at his ideal, the knowledge of oneself and of the world. He saw, as he thought, one class of his countrymen barbarous and another dull, and he knew, besides, that there are very few of us in whom a strict enquiry would not disclose some remnants of the dullard, and even some of the barbarian. To most people this does not seem to matter much. Το him it did, and he exhausted his official influence and his weight with the public as a man of letters in pleading that it does matter, and that it is vital to us as a nation and as individuals to institute a quick habit of mind for dulness, and seriousness for barbarism. That was the ideal that was behind all the forms his unwearied didacticism took. He was not his father's son for nothing. To everything he brought something of the schoolmaster: alike in his poetry, in his critical writings, and. in his official reports, he took easily to the part of teacher and preacher, and it was this lesson before all others that he preached and taught. And few men have ever been more practical, little as he had the credit of it. He never wished himself or others to lose time on what could not be drawn into the practical service of life. Of course he had nothing in common with the people sometimes called practical men, who, in the face of all theory and all experience, think, so far as they are capable of thinking, that the