s till they themselves are fifty. And 1874 is again rather
barren, even such yield as it gives being rather didactic and
controversial, as for instance in a letter to his sister, who had
apparently remonstrated with some vigour against the tone of
_Literature and Dogma_. A pleasant letter to Miss Kingsley on her
father's death (1875) puts in good evidence against the charge of
grudging appreciation of contemporaries which has often been brought
against Mr Arnold, and which some unguarded expressions, rather
injudiciously published in other letters, may seem to confirm.

Another in December contains an instance[4] of that dislike to
history, which long before its publication careful students of his
works had always noticed in him. The fact is, that to a man of ideas,
as Mr Arnold would have liked to be called--a man of theories or of
crotchets, as in extending order of unkindness people actually did
call him--history must be an annoying study. The things that ought to
happen do not happen, and the things that do happen have to be
awkwardly explained away or hazardously ignored His almost pettish
disgust for the historic estimate in literature itself may have either
caused or been caused by this more general dislike, and the dislike
itself explains the leniency with which he always regarded the sheer
guess-work of the Biblical critics. But it is possible to sympathise
with his disapproval of the divorce of History and Law, which used to
be united in the Oxford schools. Together they made a discipline,
inferior indeed, but only inferior, to that of the great school of
_Literae Humaniores_, the best intellectual training in the world.
When they are divided, it may be feared that law becomes a mere
technicality, if not a mere bread-study, and that history is at once
thin and vague.

But Clio must have made interest with Nemesis; for, but a page or two
afterwards, this disregard of history leads Mr Arnold into a very odd
blunder. His French friend, M. Fontanes, had thought of writing about
Godwin, but Mr Arnold dissuades him. "Godwin," he says, "est
interessant, mais il n'est pas une source; des courants actuels qui
nous portent, aucun ne vient de lui." Godwin is the high priest of
Anarchism; he is our first Socialist philosopher, he advocated no
marriage, woman's rights, the abolition of religion. And _dans nos
courants actuels rien ne vient de lui!_ This was early in 1876, and
later in the same year we have from him the s