Might now be lying on this bloody sand,
Near death, and by an ignorant stroke of thine,
Not thou of mine; and I might die, not thou;
And I, not thou, be borne to Seistan; 820
And Zal might weep above my grave, not thine;
And say: 0 son, I weep thee not too sore,
For willingly, I know, thou met'st thine end!
But now in blood and battles was my youth,
And full of blood and battles is my age,
And I shall never end this life of blood."

His house, now 'mid their broken flights of
steps

Lie prone, enormous, down the mountain side—
So in the sand lay Rustum by his son.

And night came down over the solemn waste,
And the two gazing hosts, and that sole pair,
| And darkened all; and a cold fog, with night,
Crept from the Oxus. Soon a hum arose
As of a great assembly loosed, and fires
Began to twinkle through the fog; for now 870

Then, at the point of death, Sohrab re- Both armies moved to camp, and took their

plied :"A life of blood indeed, thou dreadful man! But thou shalt yet have peace; only not now, Not yet! but thou shalt have it on that day, When thou shalt sail in a high-masted ship, 831 Thou and the other peers of Kai Khosroo, Returning home over the salt blue sea, From laying thy dear master in his grave." And Rustum gazed in Sohrab's face, and said:

"Soon be that day, my son, and deep that sea! Till then, if fate so wills, let me endure."

He spoke; and Sohrab smiled on him, and

took

meal;

The Persians took it on the open sands
Southward, the Tartars by the river marge;
And Rustum and his son were left alone.
But the majestic river floated on,
Out of the mist and hum of that low land,
Into the frosty starlight, and there moved,
Rejoicing, through the hushed Chorasmian
waste,

880

Under the solitary moon;-he flowed
Right for the polar star, past Orgunjè,
Brimming, and bright, and large; then sands
begin

To hem his watery march, and dam his streams, The spear, and drew it from his side, and eased And split his currents; that for many a league His wound's imperious anguish; but the blood The shorn and parcelled Oxus strains along Came welling from the open gash, and life 841 Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles— Flowed with the stream;-all down his cold | Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had

How thick the bursts come crowding through And cold, besides, his blue blood ran,

I see the tail, like bracelet twirled,
In moments of disgrace uncurled,
12 Then at a pardoning word re-furled,
A conquering sign;

To one another; for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, 72 So various, so beautiful, so new,

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's ture, or attach any value to it, as culture, at all.

See From the first chapter of Culture and Anarchy (1867), entitled "Sweetness and Light."

in a good sense as well as in a bad sense. With and beneficence, the desire for removing human us the word is always used in a somewhat dis- error, clearing human confusion, and diminishapproving sense. A liberal and intelligent ing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave eagerness about the things of the mind may be the world better and happier than we found it, meant by a foreigner when he speaks of motives eminently such as are called social,— curiosity, but with us the word always conveys come in as part of the grounds of culture, and a certain notion of frivolous and unedifying the main and pre-eminent part. Culture is, activity. In the Quarterly Review, some little then, properly described, not as having its time ago, was an estimate of the celebrated origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in French critic, M. Sainte-Beuve, and a very in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfecadequate estimate it in my judgment was. And tion. It moves by the force, not merely or its inadequacy consisted chiefly in this: that in primarily of the scientific passion for pure our English way it left out of sight the double knowledge, but also of the moral and social sense really involved in the word curiosity, passion for doing good. As, in the first view thinking enough was said to stamp M. Sainte- of it, we took for its worthy motto MontesBeuve with blame if it was said that he was quieu's words, "To render an intelligent being impelled in his operations as a critic by yet more intelligent!" so, in the second view curiosity, and omitting either to perceive that of it, there is no better motto which it can M. Sainte-Beuve himself, and many other peo- have than these words of Bishop Wilson2: "To ple with him, would consider that this was make reason and the will of God prevail!'' praiseworthy and not blameworthy, or to point out why it ought really to be accounted worthy of blame and not of praise. For, as there is a curiosity about intellectual matters which is futile and merely a disease, so there is certainly a curiosity, a desire after the things of the mind simply for their own sakes and for the pleasure of seeing them as they are, which is, in an intelligent being, natural and laudable. Nay, and the very desire to see things as they aret implies a balance and regulation of mind which is not often attained without fruitful effort, and which is the very opposite of the blind and diseased impulse of mind which is what we mean to blame when we blame curiosity. Montesquieu1 says: "The first motive which ought to impel us to study is the desire to augment the excellence of our nature, and to render an intelligent being yet more intelligent. This is the true ground to assign for the genuine scientific passion, however manifested, and for culture, viewed simply as a fruit of this passion; and it is a worthy ground, even though we let the term curiosity stand to describe it.

But there is of culture another view, in which not solely the scientific passion, the sheer desire to see things as they are, natural and proper in an intelligent being, appears as the ground of it.

There is a view in which all the love of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help,

1 A French writer of the 18th century, author of the celebrated philosophical work on The Spirit of the Laws.

This phrase, derived from Wordsworth, has been given wide currency by Arnold. See Wordsworth's Supplementary Essay to his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.

Only, whereas the passion for doing good is apt to be over-hasty in determining what reason and the will of God say, because its turn is for acting rather than thinking, and it wants to be beginning to act; and whereas it is apt to take its own conceptions, which proceed from its own state of development and share in all the imperfections and immaturities of this, for a basis of action; what distinguishes culture is, that it is possessed by the scientific passion, as well as by the passion of doing good; that it demands worthy notions of reason and the will of God, and does not readily suffer its own crude conceptions to substitute themselves for them. And knowing that no action or institution can be salutary and stable which is not based on reason and the will of God, it is not so bent on acting and instituting, even with the great aim of diminishing human error and misery ever before its thoughts, but that it can remember that acting and instituting are of little use, unless we know how and what we ought to act and to institute.

This culture is more interesting and more far-reaching than that other, which is founded solely on the scientific passion for knowing. But it needs times of faith and ardour, times when the intellectual horizon is opening and widening all round us, to flourish in. And is not the close and bounded intellectual horizon within which we have long lived and moved now lifting up, and are not new lights finding free passage to shine in upon us? For a long time there was no passage for them to make their way in upon us, and then it was of no 2 Thomas Wilson, Bishop of the Isle of Man (d. 1765).

It

use to think of adapting the world's action to aim of setting ourselves to ascertain what perthem. Where was the hope of making reason fection is, and to make it prevail; but also, in and the will of God prevail among people who determining generally in what human perfechad a routine which they had christened reason tion consists, religion comes to a conclusion and the will of God, in which they were inex-identical with that which culture, culture tricably bound, and beyond which they had no seeking the determination of this question power of looking? But now the iron force of through all the voices of human experience adhesion to the old routine,-social, political which have been heard upon it, of art, science, religious, has wonderfully yielded; the iron poetry, philosophy, history, as well as of reliforce of exclusion of all which is new has won-gion, in order to give a greater fullness and derfully yielded. The danger now is, not that certainty to its solution,-likewise reaches. Repeople should obstinately refuse to allow any-ligion says: The kingdom of God is within thing but their old routine to pass for reason you; and culture, in like manner, places human and the will of God, but either that they should perfection in an internal condition, in the allow some novelty or other to pass for these too growth and predominance of our humanity proeasily, or else that they should underrate the per, as distinguished from our animality. importance of them altogether, and think it places it in the ever-increasing efficacy and in enough to follow action for its own sake, with the general harmonious expansion of those gifts out troubling themselves to make reason and of thought and feeling which make the pecuthe will of God prevail therein. Now, then, is liar dignity, wealth, and happiness of human the moment for culture to be of service, culture nature. As I have said on a former occasion: which believes in making reason and the will"It is in making endless additions to itself, in of God prevail; believes in perfection; is the the endless expansion of its powers, in endless study and pursuit of perfection; and is no growth in wisdom and beauty, that the spirit of longer debarred, by a rigid invincible exclusion the human race finds its ideal. To reach this of whatever is new, from getting acceptance | ideal, culture is an indispensable aid, and that for its ideas, simply because they are new. is the true value of culture." Not a having The moment this view of culture is seized, the moment it is regarded not solely as the endeavour to see things as they are, to draw towards a knowledge of the universal order which seems to be intended and aimed at in the world, and which it is a man's happiness to go along with or his misery to go counter to,-to learn, in short, the will of God,—the moment, I say, culture is considered not merely as the endeavour to see and learn this, but as the endeavour, also, to make it prevail, the moral, social, and beneficent character of culture becomes manifest. The mere endeavour to see and learn the truth for our own personal satisfaction is indeed a commencement for making it prevail, a preparing the way for this, which always serves this, and is wrongly, therefore, stamped with blame absolutely in itself and not only in its caricature and degeneration. But perhaps it has got stamped with blame and disparaged with the dubious title of curiosity because, in comparison with this wider endeavour of such great and plain utility, it looks selfish, petty, and unprofitable.

And religion, the greatest and most important of the efforts by which the human race has manifested its impulse to perfect itself,religion, that voice of the deepest human expe rience, does not only enjoin and sanction the aim which is the great aim of culture, the

and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it; and here, too, it coincides with religion.

But the point of view of culture, keeping the mark of human perfection simply and broadly in view, and not assigning to this perfection, as religion or utilitarianism assigns to it, a special and limited character, this point of view, I say, of culture is best given by these words of Epictetus1: "It is a sign of àquia,'' says he, that is, of a nature not finely tempered,-"to give yourselves up to things which relate to the body; to make, for instance, a great fuss about exercise, a great fuss about eating, a great fuss about drinking, a great fuss about walking, a great fuss about riding. All these things ought to be done merely by the way; the formation of the spirit and character must be our real concern.'' This is admirable; and, indeed, the Greek word eúquia, a finely tempered nature, gives exactly the notion of perfection as culture brings us to conceive it a harmonious perfection, a perfection in which the characters of beauty and intelligence are both present, which unites the two noblest of things,'-as Swift, who of one of the two, at any rate, had himself all too little, most happily calls them in his Battle of 1 See note on Arnold's sonnet To a Friend.