PASSAGES IN A WANDERING LIFE.*

MR. Tnomes ARNOLD'S account of his mental and spiritual wanderings is much more interesting than that of his corporeal ones. When he goes back to a generation of great men now dead—when he tells us how he went into the Catholic Church—and out and in again—we are delighted, but his jonrneyings in New Zealand, Tasmania, and Sweden and Italy are hardly worth writing about. Of his father, Dr. Arnold, he tells us little that is new—there cannot be much left to tell—but his life at Fox How, and his boyish recol- lections of Wordsworth, Southey, Professor Wilson, and Hartley Coleridge, are well worth reading. With all these, according to the tradition of the Westmoreland people, his father was " ter'ble friends." Wordsworth, so Mr. Arnold gives us to understand, was not much liked by his humbler neighbours in Westmoreland. " There was a general want of practicality and esprit positif about him which raised a barrier between him and them." It was Mr. Arnold's good fortune to see the poet in one of his moods of inspira- tion. He was calling one day at Rydal Mount, at the time when the idea of constructing a railway between Kendal and Rydal was first mooted. " The poet entered, having a sheet of paper in his band, his face was flushed, his waistcoat in disarray as if he had been clutching at it under the stress of fervent thought. 'I have been writing a sonnet,' he said. After a few more words, standing up in front of the fire, he recited it to us; it was the sonnet 'Is there no nook of English ground secure from rash assault.' The force and intensity with which he uttered the lines breathed into his hearer a contagious fire, and to this hour I recollect the pre- cise manner and tone of his delivery more exactly than in the case of any verses I ever heard."

If Wordsworth had lived now he would have arranged his waistcoat before he went into his drawing-room, and said nothing about the sonnet. These great men at the Lakes, however, proclaimed their riles and acted their parts without any self-consciousness. Southey introduced himself to Mr. Arnold—when the latter was a boy—saying: " Now you have seen a real live poet." Owen Lloyd, who was regarded as an eccentric, was "generally talking to himself." Even poor Hartley Coleridge, "a melancholy ruin," about whom Mr. Arnold charitably refuses to press his recollections too far' played his part without disguise. Mr. Arnold declares that he never saw anything so comic as the look of disappoint- ment on Hartley's face when one evening at Fox How he walked across the room "to visit a jug" at Dr. Arnold's elbow and found it to contain only water.

As soon as he left Oxford Mr. Arnold gave up, as he tells us, the certain prospect of a Fellowship, and emigrated to New Zealand, where his father had bought two plots of land of about a hundred acres each. About the country he teas us little that is of interest ; a good deal, however, about his private affairs, and how he tried to change his plots of land for better ones and failed owing to legal stupidities. We should have liked to hear some more about the Maoris. The few words he does let drop make us wish for more. He describes how he visited a small Maori settlement "housed in low mean wards,' dependent on its potato patches and on fishing. Among the bones of huge whales ran about dirty pigs and children. The scene was cheerless, and the human element discouraging." Mr. Arnold is evidently not inter- ested in aborigines. He coolly remarks that fortunately it was not "found necessary" to exterminate the New Zea- landers. Mr. Arnold soon gave up the idea of farming, and began to keep a school at Nelson. Thence in 1848 he went to Tasmania, where he was offered a post as school inspector. At Hobart Town two years later he met Miss Soren, a granddaughter of a former Governor of the Colony, whom he afterwards married. Mr. Arnold describes how he and his wife used to drive together in a gig on his inspecting journeys, and how later on, when their eldest child—now • Passages in a Wandering Life. Ey Thomas Amok/. London : Edward Arnold. p.e. 6k1.1 Mrs. Humphry Ward—was added to the party, they changed the gig for a phaeton.

At the end of six years he gave up his appointment and returned to England,—because he had become a Catholic. For ten years before his conversion his mind had been in " a welter of religions uncertainty." He applies to himself Bossuet's words : " 11 frappait, pour ainsi dire, it tontes les portes pour trouver nu. refuge a ea religion chancelante." "On a Sunday in October, 1854, it happened that a passage from the first Epistle of Peter having, as it seemed, a remark- able relevance to my own mental condition at the time, came suddenly to my mind." Thus began the change which ended in Rome, but before he actually entered the Church an influence came into his life which must seem to Protestants to be of an amazing nature.

Staying one night at a country inn in the course of his duties, Mr. Arnold happened upon a Life of St. Bridget of Sweden. " This saint (belonging to the fourteenth century), who was aunt or cousin to the reigning King of Sweden, was married and had eight children. Nevertheless she lived a

most holy and self-denying life." The impression this Life made upon Mr. Arnold was, he tells us, indelible. He found

out that St. Bridget's Festival fell upon the same day in October as that on which a decisive change had been made in his mind by his sudden recollection of the words of St. Peter. As a final result he was received into the Roman Communion at Hobart Town, and left immediately for England. Here, Mr. Arnold tells us, these reminiscences might be closed, had they not to chronicle near relations arising at this time with "that extraordinary man the disintegrating effect of whose thoughts on the religious life of England was apparent then, and is perhaps still more apparent now." He means, of course, Newman. He tells us, however, much more about Newman's efforts to found an Irish Catholic University, and about life at Edgbaston—where Mr. Arnold was made Classical Master—than about the Cardinal's personality. At last Mr. Arnold drifted back to liberal religious thought and left the Oratory, having ceased to agree with its governors. He removed to Oxford, where he went on with his teaching work. The rest of his wanderings took place after he was again within the Catholic fold, and are, as he says, of the nature of pilgrimages. The most interesting of the later chapters recounts a tour in Sweden, whither he went "to visit

the earthly home of St. Bridget and the place where her bones were laid." Over the staunch Protestantism of the Netherlands Mr. Arnold is very sad. He has little hope of their reconversion, yet he does not despair, remember- ing the "recuperative power" of the true faith, the activity of the Catholics at Stockholm, and the fact "that the winning and commanding memory of St. Bridget claims more and more attention in all civilised countries." Politically, Catholics have no voice in Sweden. The reason of this intolerance, according to Mr. Arnold, is that there is no Swedish Ireland. "Sweden has no Catholic sub-kingdom attached to it." Religiously, he considers the Swedes more reasonable towards Catholicism than are the Protestant majority in England. He supports his theory chiefly upon the fact that in the Lutheran Cathedral of Upsala St. Bridget's bones and apron are still shown as relics. This, of course, could not happen in England,—partly because we threw away our sacred relics hundreds of years ago and have none left to treasure.

One can hardly quote from this book without doing it injustice. It is lifted above the commonplace and the unreasonable by the attitude of the writer, which is simple, unworldly, and full of a dignified humility. Perhaps the passage which describes his second change of faith may beat illustrate what we mean :—

" Again the mists of Pyrrhonism, of which I spoke at a former page, closed round me. Nevertheless, I cannot doubt that this period of uncertainty would have passed away in due time if I had adopted the means proper for dealing with it. One of those means, indeed—labour—I did not put from me, and this was my salvation in the end, but the weapon of prayer—being attacked by a certain moroseness and disgust and weariness of existence— I began unhappily to use less and less. I did not, like Milton, still bear up and steer straight onward, but wavered—doubted- and fell back. Only after a long time, and with much difficulty and pain—pain, alas ! not mine alone—was I able to return to the firm ground of the Catholic Communion. Upon these matters, however, having made an avowal which, I need hardly say, it has cost me much to make, I shall no further enlarge. The instability

and weakness of my proceedings I do not wish to palliate or underestimate. The only plea that I can urge is that I acted in good faith, and that the taint of self-interest never attached to what I did."

We are reminded of a sonnet by Aubrey de Vere beginning:— "Ye who would build the churches of the Lord See that ye make the western portals low,

Let no one enter who disdains to bow."

Truly the Catholic Church sees that her doors are low. Those who were not born within cannot enter, " except they become

as little children." This discipline is what gives to Roman converts their apostolic charm. Many modern Protestant Christians who put good works very far above faith or worship, and who are, alas! often as graceless as they are useful, may find pleasure and edification in these pages,— even though they may smile at the "compelling influence of

St. Bridget " as instinctively as they would recoil from her bones.