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PARTISAN REVIEW
foreign to many students. They can read a computer more easily
than a great political thriller by Conrad, like
The Secret Agent,
that re–
quires knowing when the Russian Revolution occurred and what the
anarchist movement was all about.
Still, that makes teaching, which is my life and my love, possi–
ble. But Matthew Arnold's question
Who prop, thou ask'st, in these bad
days,
rrry
mind?
is a question I ask myself day and night, even if it is
addressed to nobody but myself. After praising Homer as "the clear–
est-soul'd of men," and Epictetus, Arnold ends with his famous trib–
ute to SophocJes:
But be his
My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul,
From first youth tested up to extreme old age,
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild;
Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole .
Ah, that nineteenth-century faith in the book, especially a book
not of your own century! Matthew Arnold so much believed in the
classics that on his many journeys as a school inspector to the grim
state schools of industrial England he cheered himself up with his fa–
mous touchstones, examples of what, he confidently believed, em–
bodied another of his lasting phrases- "the best that has been
thought and said in the world ."
The most exquisite lines that stayed in Arnold's beautifully
cultivated mind- from Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, etc.,
etc.- their tone, their extension into and from the mind, their "high
seriousness," "the high seriousness which comes from absolute sin–
cerity"-these gave him not only, he was assured, a standard by
which to test the poetry "on burning ground as we approach the po–
etry of times so near to us," but obviously great comfort in the face of
modern illiteracy. In the essay "Literature and Science," he sadly
notes:
I once mentioned in a school-report how a young man in one of
our English training colleges having to paraphrase the passage in
Macbeth
beginning,
Cans't thou not minister to a mind diseased?
turned this line into
Can you not wait upon the lunatic?
And I
remarked what a curious state of things it would be, if every
pupil of our national schools knew, let us say, that the moon is
