held
the opinion that Literature, rather than Science, was the chief agent in
culture. In 1872 he wrote to an enquirer: "A single line of poetry,
working in the mind, may produce more thought and lead to more light,
which is what man wants, than the fullest acquaintance (to take your own
instance) with the processes of digestion." In 1884 he said to his
American audience: "My own studies have been almost wholly in Letters,
and my visits to the field of the natural sciences have been very slight
and inadequate, although those sciences have always strongly moved my
curiosity." In a word, he was, and gloried in being, a Humanist. What
Humanism meant for him is curiously illustrated by his comment on some
speeches which the late[14] Lord Salisbury delivered at Oxford on his
first appearance there as Chancellor of the University. After praising
his skill and courtesy, Arnold says: "He is a dangerous man, through,
and chiefly from, his want of any true sense and experience of
literature and its beneficent function. Religion he knows, and physical
science he knows; but the immense work between the two, which is for
literature to accomplish, he knows nothing of; and all his speeches at
Oxford[15] pointed this way. On the one hand, he was full of the great
future for physical science, and begging his University to make up her
mind to it, and to resign much of her literary studies; on the other
hand, he was full, almost defiantly full, of counsels and resolves for
retaining and upholding the old ecclesiastical and dogmatic form of
religion. From a juxtaposition of this kind, nothing but shocks and
collisions can come."

_The immense work which is for literature to accomplish._ This work,
lying between the work of Religion and the work of Science, was, in his
view, nothing less than the culture of Humanity. Religion had its
sphere, and Science had its sphere, but culture was to be effected
neither by Religion nor by Science, but by Literature. The literature
which he extolled was literature in its widest sense--ancient and
modern, English and Continental, Occidental and Oriental--whatever
contained "the best which had been thought and said in the world." And,
when we come to the sub-divisions of literature, we note that he was
pre-eminently a classicist. This he was partly by temperament, partly by
training, partly by his matured and deliberate judgment. It can scarcely
be doubted that he had an innate love of perfect form, an inn