g for
sweetness, light, beauty and colour, instead of the bitterness, the
ugliness, the gloom and the drab which provided such large portions of
English life. "The [Greek: euphnes] is the man who turns towards
sweetness and light; the [Greek: aphnes] on the other hand is our
Philistine." "I do not much believe in good being done by a man unless
he can give _light_." "Oxford by her ineffable charm keeps ever calling
us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection, to
_beauty_." In his constant quest for these glorious things--beauty,
colour, sweetness, and light,--his sense of delicacy had much to
undergo; for, in the class with which he was by the work of his life
brought in contact, they were unknown and unimagined; and the only class
where "elegance and refinement, beauty and grace" were found, was
inaccessible to Light. In both classes he found free scope for his
doctrine of Delicacy, one day remonstrating with a correspondent for
"living in a place with the absurd, and worse, name of 'Marine
Retreat'"; another, preaching that "a piano in a Quaker's drawing-room
is a step for him to more humane life;" and again "liking and respecting
polite tastes in a grandee," when Lord Ravensworth consulted him
about Latin verses. "At present far too many of Lord Ravensworth's class
are mere men of business, or mere farmers, or mere horse-racers, or mere
men of pleasure." That was a consummation which delicacy in the
Aristocratic class would make impossible. To cultivate in oneself, and
apply in one's conduct, this instinct of delicacy, was a lesson which no
one, who fell under Arnold's influence, could fail to learn. He taught
us to "liberate the gentler element in oneself," to eschew what was base
and brutal, unholy and unkind. He taught us to seek in every department
of life for what was "lovely and of good report," tasteful, becoming,
and befitting; to cultivate "man's sense for beauty, and man's instinct
for fit and pleasing forms of social life and manners." He taught us to
plan our lives, as St. Paul taught the Corinthians to plan their
worship, [Greek: euschmnonos kai kata taxin],"--in right, graceful, or
becoming figure, and by fore-ordered arrangement."[45] Alike his
teaching and his example made us desire (however imperfectly we attained
our object) to perceive in all the contingencies and circumstances of
life exactly the line of conduct which would best consist with Delicacy,
and so to make virtue