hich were
staunch individualism and a passion for doing what one likes; a love of
field sports; vigour, good looks, fine complexions, care for the body
and all manly exercises; distinguished bearing, high spirit, and
self-confidence--an admirable collection of attributes indeed, but
marred by insufficiency of light, and "needing, for ideal perfection, a
shade more soul." When we have done with the Barbarians at the top of
the social edifice, and the Middle Class half way up, we come to the
Working Class; and of that class the higher portion "looks forward to
the happy day when it will sit on thrones with commercial Members of
Parliament and other Middle Class potentates; and this portion is
naturally akin to the Philistinism just above it. But below this there
is that vast portion of the Working Class which, raw and undeveloped,
has long lain half hidden amidst its poverty and squalor, and is now
issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born
right of doing as he likes. To this vast residuum we give the name of
'Populace.'" In thus dividing the nation, he is careful to point out
that in each class we may from time to time find "aliens"--men free from
the prejudices, the faults, the temptations of the class in which they
were born; elect souls who, unhindered by their antecedents, share the
higher life of intellectual and moral aspiration.

But, after making this exception, he traces in all three classes the
presence and working of the same besetting sin. All alike, by a dogged
persistence in doing as they like, have come to ignore the existence of
Authority or Right Reason; and this irrecognition of what ought to be
the rule of life operates not only in the political sphere, but also,
and conspicuously, in the spheres of morals, taste, society, and
literature. Self-satisfaction blinds all classes. All alike believe
themselves infallible, and there is no sovereign organ of opinion to set
them right. The fundamental ground of our erroneous habits, and our
unwillingness to be corrected, is "our preference of doing to thinking,"
The mention of this preference leads us to the subject of Chapter IV,
"Hebraism and Hellenism."

[Illustration: Matthew Arnold, 1869

_Photo Hills & Saunders_]

Of all the phrases which Arnold either created or popularized, there is
none more closely associated with his memory than this famous
conjunction of Hebraism and Hellenism; and in this connexion, it is not
out of pl