h his robust sense of a right to exist
on the old unmuddled fighting terms, to be a sane and decent animal,
under civilised moral governance a miserable sinner, was among those who
observed his waverings without prejudice, or anything but an
affectionate solicitude that whichever way Arnold went he should find
the satisfactions he sought. The conviction that settled the matter was
accidental, the work of a moment, a free instinct and a thing made with
hands--the dead Shelley where the sea threw him and the sculptor fixed
him, under his memorial dome in the gardens of University College. Here
one leafy afternoon Arnold came so near praying that he raised his head
in some confusion at the thought of the profane handicraftsman who might
claim the vague tribute of his spirit. Then fell the flash by which he
saw, deeply concealed in his bosom and disguised with a host of
spiritual wrappings, what he uncompromisingly identified as the artistic
bias, the aesthetic point of view. The discovery worked upon him so that
he spent three days without consummated prayer at all, occupied in the
effort to find out whether he could yet indeed worship in purity of
spirit, or how far the paralysis of the ideal of mere beauty had crept
upon his devotions. In the end he cast the artistic bias, the aesthetic
point of view, as far from him as his will would carry, and walked away
in another direction from which, if he turned his head, he could see the
Church of Rome sitting with her graven temptations gathered up in her
skirts, looking mournfully after him. He had been a priest of the Clarke
Mission to Calcutta, a "Clarke Brother," six years when he stood in the
door of Ahsing's little shop in Bentinck street while Lindsay explained
to Ahsing his objection to patent-leather toe caps; six years which had
not worn or chilled him, because, as he would have cheerfully admitted,
he had recognised the facts and lowered his personal hopes of
achievement--lowered them with a heroism which took account of himself
as no more than a spiritual molecule rightly inspired and moving to the
great future, already shining behind coming aeons, of the universal
Kingdom. Indeed, his humility was scientific; he made his deductions
from the granular nature of all change, moral and material. He never
talked or thought of the Aryan souls that were to shine with peculiar
oriental brightness as stars in the crown of his reward; he saw rather
the ego and the energy of him