The third (strictly the middle) piece fortunately requires no
allowances, and suffers from no drawbacks. "Literature and Science" is
an apology for a liberal education, and for a rationally ordered
hierarchy of human study, which it would be almost impossible to
improve, and respecting which it is difficult to think that it can
ever grow obsolete. Not only was Mr Arnold here on his own ground, but
he was fighting for his true mistress, with the lance and sword and
shield that he had proved. And the result is like that, of the
fortunate fights of romance: he thrusts his antagonists straight over
the crupper, he sends them rolling on the ground, and clutching its
sand with their fingers. Even Mr Huxley, stoutest and best of all the
Paynim knights, never succeeded in wiping off this defeat; and it is
tolerably certain that no one else will. The language of the piece is
unusually lacking in ornateness or fanciful digression; but the logic
is the strongest that Mr Arnold ever brought to bear.
The three last essays we have mentioned, apart from the pathetic and
adventitious interest which attaches to them as last, would be in any
case among the best of their author's, and their value is (at least,
as it seems to me) in an ascending scale. To care very much for that
on Count Tolstoi is not easy for those who are unfashionable enough
not to care very much for the eloquent Russian himself. Nothing is
satisfactory that one can only read in translations. But Mr Arnold, in
whom a certain perennial youthfulness was (as it often, if not always,
is in the chosen of the earth) one of his most amiable features, seems
to have conceived a new _engouement_ for this new and quaintly
flavoured Russian literature. Had he lived longer, he probably would
have sung us something in a cautionary strain; just as it can never be
sufficiently regretted that he did not live long enough to handle
Ibsenism. And it would have been very particularly pleasant to hear
him on those _Memoirs of a Mongol Minx_ (as they have been
profanely called), which are assigned to the great Marie Bashkirtseff;
or on those others of the learned She-Mathematician, who waited with a
friend on a gentleman and suggested that he should marry _one_ of
them, no matter which, and lead both about. But the mixture of
freshness, of passion, and of regard for conduct in Count Tolstoi
could not but appeal to him; and he has given us a very charming
_causerie_ on _Anna Karenina_, notable--like O'Rourke's
noble feast--to
"Those who were there
And those who were not,"--
to those who have read the book itself, and to those who have not yet
found time to read it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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