Born, at Laleham, 24 Dec. 1822. Educated till 1836 at Laleham; at Winchester 1836–37; at Rugby, 1837–41. Family removed to Rugby (where his father was headmaster) in 1828. Scholarship at Balliol Coll., Oxford, Nov. 1840. To Balliol, Oct. 1841. Hertford Scholarship, 1842; Newdigate Prize, 1843; B.A., Dec. 1844; M.A., 1853; Fellow of Oriel Coll., 28 March 1845 to 6 April 1852. Private Sec. to Lord Lansdowne, 1847–51. Married Fanny Lucy Wightman, 10 June 1851. For a short time Assistant Master at Rugby, 1851. Appointed Lay Inspector of Schools, 1851. Prof. of Poetry at Oxford, 1857–67. Visits to France, Germany, and Holland on education business, 1859, 1865 and 1866. Hon. LL.D., Edinburgh, 1869; Hon. D.C.L., Oxford, 21 June 1870; Order of Commander of Crown of Italy (in recognition of his tutorship of the Duke of Genoa), 1871. Rede Lecturer at Cambridge, 1882. Hon LL.D., Cambridge, 1883. Visits to America, 1883, and 1886. Died, 15 April 1888. Buried at Laleham. Works: “Alaric at Rome,” 1840; “Cromwell,” 1843; “The Strayed Reveller,” by A., 1849; “Empedocles on Etna,” 1852; “Poems” (1st series), 1853; “Poems” (2nd series), 1855; “Merope,” 1858; “England and the Italian Question,” 1859; “Popular Education in France,” 1861; “On Translating Homer,” 1861; “Last Words on Translating Homer,” 1862; “A French Eton,” 1864; “Essays in Criticism” (1st series), 1865; “New Poems,” 1867; “On the Study of Celtic Literature,” 1867; “Saint Brandan” (from “Fraser’s Magazine”), 1867; “Schools and Universities on the Continent,” 1868; “Poems” (collected), 1869; “Culture and Anarchy,” 1869; “St. Paul and Protestantism,” 1870; “Friendship’s Garland,” 1871; “A Bible Reading for Schools,” 1872; “Literature and Dogma,” 1873; “Higher Schools and Universities in Germany” (part of “Schools and Universities on the Continent,” reprinted), 1874; “God and the Bible,” 1875; “The Great Prophecy of Israel’s Restoration,” 1875; “Last Essays on Church and Religion,” 1877; “Mixed Essays,” 1879; “Geist’s Grave” (from “Fortnightly Review”) 1881; “Irish Essays,” 1882; “Isaiah of Jerusalem,” 1883; “Discourses in America,” 1885; “Essays in Criticism” (2nd series), 1888; “Special Report on Elementary Education Abroad,” 1888; “Civilization in the United States,” 1888. Posthumous: “Reports on Elementary Schools,” 1889; “On Home Rule for Ireland” (two letters to the “Times;” priv. ptd.), 1891; “Letters,” ed. by G. W. E. Russell (2 vols.), 1895. He edited: selections from Johnson’s “Lives of the Poets,” 1878; Wordsworth’s Poems (in “Golden Treasury Series”), 1879; Byron’s Poems (in “Golden Treasury Series”), 1881; “Burke’s Letters, Speeches, and Tracts on Irish Affairs,” 1881. He contributed: an introduction to “The Hundred Greatest Men,” 1879; three essays to T. H. Ward’s “English Poets,” 1880; an introduction to J. Smith’s “Natural Truth of Christianity,” 1882; “Sainte-Beuve” to “Encyclopædia Britannica,” 1886; on “Schools” to T. H. Ward’s “Reign of Queen Victoria,” 1887.

Personal

  Matt does not know what it is to work because he so little knows what it is to think. But I am hopeful about him more than I was: his amiableness of temper seems very great, and some of his faults appear to me less; and he is so loving to me that it ought to make me not only hopeful, but very patient and long-suffering towards him. Besides, I think that he is not so idle as he was, and that there is a better prospect of his beginning to read in earnest. Alas! that we should have to talk of prospects only, and of no performance as yet which deserves the name of “earnest reading.”

  It is observable that Matthew Arnold, the eldest son, and the author of the volume of poems to which you allude, inherits his mother’s defect. Striking and prepossessing in appearance, his manner displeases from its seeming foppery. I own it caused me at first to regard him with regretful surprise; the shade of Dr. Arnold seemed to me to frown on his young representative. I was told, however, that “Mr. Arnold improved upon acquaintance.” So it was: ere long a real modesty appeared under his assumed conceit, and some genuine intellectual aspirations, as well as high educational requirements, displaced superficial affectations. I was given to understand that his theological opinions were very vague and unsettled, and indeed he betrayed as much in the course of conversation. Most unfortunate for him, doubtless, has been the untimely loss of his father.

  Soon after reaching London, I called on dear old Barry Cornwall, who has taken a great liking to Lorry Graham. Mrs. Procter invited both of us and our wives to a literary soirée at their house. In the meantime Lorry took me with him to call on Matthew Arnold. He is a man to like, if not love, at first sight. His resemblance to George Curtis struck both of us. A little more stoutly built, more irregularly masculine features, but the same general character of man, with the same full, mellow voice. After Thackeray, I think I should soon come to like him better than any other Englishman. His eyes sparkled when I told him that I always kept his poems on my library table.

  Matthew Arnold has just come in, and we have had a talk. I thought at first he looked a little as if he did not approve of my pitching into him, but then he said very nicely that he had seen a speech of mine, which he liked very much…. Arnold’s manner is very ha-ha; but I have no doubt he is a very good fellow.

  Mr. Matthew Arnold has been to the college, and has given his lecture on Emerson…. Never was a man listened to with so much attention. Whether he is right in his judgment or not, he held his audience by his manly way, his kindly dissection, and his graceful English. Socially, he charmed us all. He chatted with every one, he smiled on all…. We have not had such an awakening for years. It was like a new volume of old English poetry.

  I believe that a more blameless, nay, a more admirable, man in every relation never lived. He was one of the noblest and most perfect characters I have ever known, and I have known him sixty years. I would not withdraw one word of what I said at the Union [League] Club at New York. It was not generous, it was true. I think him the most distinguished person in the old and right sense of that word that we had among us. To think we shall never have such papers any more, never hear him talk to us, never see that bright, manly, beautiful face any more!

  Mr. Arnold was not, I believe, a collector of anything. He certainly was not of books. I once told him I had been reading a pamphlet, written by him in 1859, on the Italian Question. He inquired how I came across it. I said I had picked it up in a shop. “Oh, yes,” said he, “some old curiosity shop, I suppose.” Nor was he joking. He seemed quite to suppose that old books, and old clothes, and old chairs were huddled together for sale in the same resort of the curious. He did not care about such things. The prices given for the early editions of his own poems seemed to tease him. His literary taste was broadly democratic. He had no mind for fished-up authors, nor did he ever indulge in swaggering rhapsodies over second-rate poets.

  I knew Arnold personally, though I cannot boast of having known him so intimately as to be provided with reminiscences…. Though our acquaintance was not so close as I could have wished, it left me with a singularly strong impression of Arnold’s personal charm. Though the objects of my worship were to him mere wooden idols; though I once satisfactorily confuted him in an article, now happily forgotten by myself and everybody else; though I was once his Editor, and forced in that capacity to reject certain articles, on grounds, of course, quite apart from literary merit; yet he was always not only courteous but cordial, and, I may almost say, affectionate. He had that obvious sweetness of nature, which it is impossible not to recognize and not to love. Though in controversy he took and gave many shrewd blows, he always received them with a courtesy, indicative not of mere policy or literary tact, but of dislike to inflicting pain and of incapacity for having any tolerably decent antagonist in flesh and blood.

  In reproduction, the defects of his face were easily exaggerated, while its finer and more characteristic qualities were of the kind which no photograph can more than suggest. Of his features the mouth was at first disappointing, being unusually large; but the lines were firm, and in conversation the early unfavourable impression was quickly lost. It was the kind of mouth which we associate with generous and sensitive natures, and its smiles were of a winning and whimsical attractiveness…. His look was altogether noble…. His unusual height and erect bearing, the thick brown hair, scarcely changed, despite his sixty years, and growing in lines of perfect grace about a brow of peculiar breadth and beauty, the clear, benignant gaze of the blue-gray eyes—these alone must have given him always and everywhere an air of preëminent distinction…. Certain it is that Mr. Arnold’s superiority of mien gave offense in some directions, appearing to be regarded as a kind of involuntary criticism. In addition to this, his lofty mental attitude and gravity of demeanor were by some felt to be oppressive, and were misconstrued as pride. Yet proud, in a narrow and selfish sense, Arnold was not. His nature, full of dignity, was yet gentle and singularly sweet, and his interest in the masses was sympathetic and sincere…. Lycidas is dead, and hath not left his peer!

  Qualified by nature and training for the highest honours and successes which the world can give, he spent his life in a long round of unremunerative drudgery, working even beyond the limits of his strength for those whom he loved, and never by word or sign betraying even a consciousness of that dull indifference to his gifts and services which stirred the fruitless indignation of his friends. His theology, once the subject of some just criticism, seems now a matter of comparatively little moment; for, indeed, his nature was essentially religious. He was loyal to truth as he knew it, loved the light and sought it earnestly, and by his daily and hourly practice gave sweet and winning illustration of his own doctrine that conduct is three-fourths of human life.

  He was not the least of an egotist, in the common ugly and odious sense of that terrible word. He was incapable of sacrificing the smallest interest of anybody else to his own; he had not a spark of envy or jealousy; he stood well aloof from all the hustlings and jostlings by which selfish men push on; he bore life’s disappointments, and he was disappointed in some reasonable hopes and anticipations, with good nature and fortitude; he cast no burden upon others, and never shrank from bearing his own share of the daily load to the last ounce of it; he took the deepest, sincerest, and most active interest in the well-being of his country and his countrymen. Is it not absurd to think of such a man as an egotist, simply because he took a child’s pleasure in his own performance, and liked to know that somebody thought well of his poetry, or praised his lecture, or laughed at his wit?

  He was a man of rare gifts. But he was likewise a model son, a model husband, model citizen. Genius, though not an everyday phenomenon, is, I suppose, as frequent in these days as others; and, perhaps, there never was, before, so much cleverness as is now to be observed in almost every walk of life. But character—character that shows itself in filial piety, in conjugal tenderness, in good and conscientious citizenship—is perhaps not too conspicuous, especially in persons exceptionally endowed. One looks in vain for a serious blemish in Matthew Arnold’s character.

  With a satirical smile and a tone of commiseration, he would make a thrust, keen as a steel rapier, at the vulnerable point in the character of one whom he disliked, and then heal the wound by expatiating upon his good qualities.

  The latter, with his brother Thomas, had been sent to me by their father as private pupils in a small Long Vacation party in the summer before Matthew was elected scholar at Balliol, and it is needless to say that, from my intimate connection with his family, we were very close friends during the whole of his Balliol days. He showed us both the strong and the weak sides of his character as a scholar, for he was certainly equally brilliant, desultory, and idle, and his want of knowledge of his books lost him his “first,” when he was obliged, by the strictness of the college rule, to go into the Schools at the end of his third year, his examiners and his tutors being equally disappointed. I remember Liddell in particular expressing his annoyance that so able a man should have excluded himself from the highest honours.

  He was beautiful as a young man, strong and manly, yet full of dreams and schemes. His Olympian manners began even at Oxford; there was no harm in them, they were natural, not put on. The very sound of his voice and the wave of his arm were Jovelike.

  Matthew Arnold came to this country and gave one hundred lectures. Nobody ever heard any of them, not even those sitting in the front row. At his first appearance in Chickering Hall every seat was sold at a high price. Chauncey M. Depew introduced the speaker. I was looking after the business in the front of the house. There was not a seat to be had excepting a few that were held by speculators on the sidewalk. As Mr. Depew and Matthew Arnold appeared before the audience, somebody told me that General and Mrs. Grant had just arrived and had seats in the gallery, but some other people were occupying them. I immediately got a policeman, and working through the standing crowd, found that they were the last two seats on the aisle in the gallery. We had no difficulty in getting the occupants to vacate as soon as they discovered who held the tickets. We had just heard the last few sentences of Mr. Depew’s introduction when Matthew Arnold stepped forward, opened out his manuscript, laid it on the desk, and his lips began to move. There was not the slightest sound audible from where I stood. After a few minutes General Grant said to Mrs. Grant, “Well, wife, we have paid to see the British lion; we cannot hear him roar, so we had better go home.” They left the hall. A few minutes later there was a stream of people leaving the place. All those standing went away very early. Later on, the others who could not endure the silence moved away as quietly as they could.

  Judging from the many evidences of his early devotion and unflagging regard for his family, one is tempted to doubt the piece of gossip told about the way he received his family when they went to see him after he had been three months at the University—that when they were inside his lodgings, he said: “Thank God, you’re all in,” and when they were gone; “Thank God, you’re all out.” Though indeed Thomas Arnold admits that that young gownsman “welcomed his rustic geschwister with an amused and superior graciousness.” Matthew’s alert intellect, his charming waggery, and, his brother adds, his fashionable dressing, soon made him popular at Oxford where he was first welcomed for his father’s fame. Max Müller’s portrait of him, more graceful and authentic than one may hope to rival, declares: “He was beautiful, strong and manly, full of dreams and schemes…. His Olympian manners began even at Oxford … the very sound of his voice and the wave of his arms were Jovelike.”

  Matthew Arnold was always to me, whether in the whirl of London society or in a quiet corner at the Athenæum, or in his modest Surrey home at Cobham, one of the most delightful of men to listen to. He was so cordial, so full of kindly simplicity, that I never once detected in the genial flow of his conversation that academic note which some have objected to.

Literature and Dogma, 1873

  It is a book of rare moral and intellectual force, original in the greatness and directness of its aim as well as in its style and diction. Mr. Arnold has felt that the time has come for him to speak out; and the creed which he here expounds and commends has a good claim to be regarded as one of the three or four leading “Gospels” of this speculative age. He proposes to guide the thought of the coming time in a channel different from any other that has yet been cut for it. Once again the much shaken mind of this generation has a promise of certainty and peace offered to it; another standard has been raised for dissatisfied intellects to follow; and there are characteristics of Mr. Arnold’s creed, which are likely to make it, to a large section of Englishmen, more attractive than any rival…. Few books, I believe that most of his readers will feel, have ever more urgently challenged the attention of those who believe in the God and the Christ of Christendom. It is of no use to complain of the dangerousness of Mr. Arnold’s treatise. Its out-spoken plainness marks it as the product of an age in which it is settled that, at whatever risk and with whatever consequences, all beliefs shall be openly called in question and searched and sifted without mercy.

  It is hard to understand how a man who talks so much of sweetness can have managed to steep his pen in such monotonous sourness; how one who extols seriousness can mix such excess of flippancy with the gravest topics; how one who surveys the field of thought from a loftier plane can descend into such pettinesses of jangling. It is not wonderful that in so doing he should become often unjust to his opponents. But for this, we would gladly have passed by this disagreeable side of the book unnoticed.

  Mr. Arnold’s “Literature and Dogma” is a most noteworthy and even startling production, on several accounts. In one respect it resembles “Ecce Homo,” but differs from it in many more. Like that work it is (in the later portion at least) an attempt to conceive the precise purpose and mission of Christ, as well as the essentials of his character. But the conclusion arrived at is singularly discrepant…. It cannot for a moment be doubted by any one who reads “Literature and Dogma” in an appreciative and unprejudiced temper, that Mr. Arnold’s religious instincts and intuitions are often remarkably penetrating, and nearly always beautiful and touching, even if habitually too much coloured by his own inherent preferences; and where they are erroneous and fanciful, the error arises not so much from any defect of intellectual—we might almost say spiritual—perception, as from a sort of naïve and confident audacity which enables him to deal with his materials rather as a creative poet than a conjecturing and investigating critic. He does not so much guess or infer,—he knows what each writer meant, even where that writer’s words do not exactly tally with his reasoning.

  It is part of Mr. Arnold’s inimitable manner—a point in his graceful and captivating tactics—to make it appear that he is not really asking much of even the most startled of his hearers; that those who seem furthest from him are really not so very far removed; and that the path that leads from one to the other is a great deal smoother and easier than it looks. That is, as it has always been, Mr. Arnold’s urbane and dexterous method of procedure; and, of course, it is apt, despite its dialectical merits, to beget a twofold misconception. It leads some people into the error just referred to—that, namely, of supposing that their instructor is unconscious of the immense demand which he is really making upon them, the vast spiritual effort he is exacting from them, as reasoners and thinkers about religion; while in other minds it encourages the precisely converse mistake of fancying that the undertaking to which he has devoted himself is as simple a matter as his air of confident composure would appear to imply. It is, however, almost needless to add that in view of Mr. Arnold’s high repute for sagacity and penetration, the latter of these misconceptions is likely to be much the more common of the two. One does not lightly suspect so clear an intelligence of having underrated the difficulties of its task; and most people, therefore, will be more ready to believe that the task itself is easier, and his handling of it more successful than is actually the case.

  For my own part I rejoice in this opportunity to say that to no book in the world do I owe so much as to “Literature and Dogma,” unless it be to the great Book with which it so largely deals.

  It is full of repetitions and wearisome recapitulations, well enough in a magazine where each issue is sure to be read by many who will never see another number, but which disfigure a book. The style is likewise too jaunty. Bantering the Trinity is not yet a recognised English pastime. Bishop-baiting is, but this notwithstanding, most readers of “Literature and Dogma” grew tired of the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol and of his alleged desire to do something for the honour of the Godhead, long before Mr. Arnold showed any signs of weariness.

Letters

  These letters are a gift of sunshine to the world, not, like certain posthumous publications, a chill drizzle of rain, not, like others, a tempest with dangerous flashes of lightening. Of all eminent men, lately lost, Matthew Arnold perhaps best deserves to be loved. In his published writings there were at times a not unbecoming hauteur, a happy malice of the pen, and even something which, while really dexterity in saying things difficult to utter, might be mistaken for affectation. In these letters a more intimate side of his character is revealed to the public; they are absolutely simple and real; wholly free from strain; rich in the temper of enjoyment; unfailing in the spirit of genuine affection; and behind their kindness and their brightness we can discern strength, and even something of unostentatious heroism—loyalty to duty, loyalty to truth, loyalty an ideal of life.

  To me they have been absolutely fascinating. Those who hold, with Arnold himself, that he was capable of teaching England lessons of which England stood in special need; who are conscious that, however imperfectly they may have learnt his lesson, their own lives are richer and mellower because he lived and wrote; and who feel that, though they may know him only through his books, still to know him even so is “part of our life’s unalterable good”—all these may join in the earnest hope that these volumes may be widely read, and may do much to spread a knowledge of one of the greatest of our nineteenth-century poets.

  Arnold’s style expresses all variety of matter with clearness, ease, and grace, never running into rhetoric or the formal rhythm of literary prose. One might expect some flights of this sort in the description of the Alps or of Italy. One remembers that Shelley could never write in his dressing-gown even to his wife; he could never lay aside his splendor of diction and his beautiful rhythm. Mr. Arnold, while never slipshod, uses prose as clear and transparent as those Alpine streams in which he delighted. From these letters we gradually learn his taste, his passion for flowers, combining the learning of a botanist with the enthusiasm of a poet; his fondness for the “bright comradeship” of some mountain brook, and his real sympathy with birds and domestic animals. One letter narrates the virtues and graces of his Persian cat Atossa; another is an obituary of the pony Lola, who died suddenly in an honored old age. But, most of all, the playfulness and tenderness of his nature are revealed in his allusions to his children. They continually come up in this correspondence, and are never in the way, though we know that children are often de trop in books as well as in the drawing-room.

  It is instructive to find that Mr. Arnold’s literary income was rated at two hundred pounds, that he said he would need to write more essays to cover that sum, and that the tax commissioners courteously congratulated themselves on his promised industry. One of the foremost of our men of letters made two hundred pounds a year, while, look at the half-educated and quite uninspired novelists! Mr. Arnold thought but poorly of Tennyson’s intellect, he had no high opinion of Thackeray, he called Burns “a beast with magnificent gleams,” but he admired Miss Ingelow—and very properly. I remember no mention of Rossetti, or Mr. William Morris, or of any contemporary almost, in England. Perhaps the less said about his contemporary judgments, the better. His political ideas are more worthy of him, his affection and kindness are the essence of the man, and they shine unobscured. But, like George Eliot, Mr. Arnold did not appear at his best as a letter-writer.

  He surely was a religious man. If his books do not show it, his letters reveal him as simply, unaffectedly, but ardently religious; and however much the daring of some of his modes of speech and the flippancy of some of his utterances may have shocked minds accustomed only to reverent treatment of religious themes, and may have disposed superficial readers to consider him an opponent of Christianity, it is impossible to read his books in the light of this interpretation without feeling that not without pain and sorrow, and in obedience to an imperative inward command, he had broken away from the faith of his fathers.

  They are disappointing in various respects; they scarcely seem worthy of his great reputation; and especially in his literary judgments does he seem to come short of what we should expect; but, on the other hand, they show the native simplicity, kindliness, and warmth of the man’s character, and how admirable he was in all the domestic and ordinary relations of life.

Poetry

  In the morning, Dante xxviii. Clough came to dinner and brought me young (Matthew) Arnold’s poems. Very clever; with a little of the Tennysonian leaven in them.

  Mr. Arnold and Mr. Swinburne are both ardently and consciously polemical. Mr. Arnold is a more dignified and composed partisan than Mr. Swinburne, but he too fights for a side. He does the gentlemanly and quiet work in the committee-room; Mr. Swinburne rushes into the street, calls names, puts his hands to his sides, and shouts till he is hoarse; but both are for their party. Mr. Swinburne makes “Atalanta in Calydon” the vehicle of a vociferous atheism, obtrusively blasphemous, than which nothing can be conceived more alien to the reverent and thoughtful spirit of Greek poetry. His crashing atheistic odes would have startled the hunters and huntresses of the Calydonian boar more than the most terrific charges of that dangerous beast…. Mr. Arnold does not offend so glaringly against the spirit of Greek poetry as Mr. Swinburne; but he too, in his “Empedocles on Etna,” is modern and polemical, and summons the old Greek from the caverns of Etna to put into his mouth a dialect which neither he nor his fathers knew, a dialect compounded from the writings of Comte, Carlyle, and M. de Sainte Beuve.

  The supreme charm of Mr. Arnold’s work is a sense of right resulting in a spontaneous temperance which bears no mark of curb or snaffle, but obeys the hand with imperceptible submission and gracious reserve. Other and older poets are to the full as vivid, as incisive and impressive; others have a more pungent colour, a more trenchant outline; others as deep knowledge and as fervid enjoyment of natural things. But no one has in like measure that tender and final quality of touch which tempers the excessive light and suffuses the refluent shades; which as it were washes with soft air the sides of the earth, steeps with dew of quiet and dyes with colours of repose the ambient ardour of noon, the fiery affluence of evening. His verse bathes us with fresh radiance and light rain, when weary of the violence of summer and winter in which others dazzle and detain us; his spring wears here and there a golden waif of autumn, his autumn a rosy spray of spring. His tones and effects are pure, lucid, aërial; he knows by some fine impulse of temperance all rules of distance, of reference, of proportion; nothing is thrust or pressed upon our eyes, driven or beaten into our ears. For the instinctive selection of simple and effectual detail he is unmatched among English poets of the time, unless by Mr. Morris, whose landscape has much of the same quality, as clear, as noble, and as memorable.

  “Merope” was a failure, as every poem must be where the author forgets that it is the wide human feeling, and not the local (Greek or other) expression which is the permanent thing. And the failure in “Merope” was more conspicuous for two reasons: (1), by reason of the severity of the form, and (2), by reason of its unsuitableness to the artistic temperament of the author. “Powerful thought and emotion flowing in strongly marked channels make a stronger impression:” which is true: but then the deep lines and furrows must be filled. A mere rivulet flowing through a gigantic arch does not produce a strong impression; a rivulet and a slight rustic arch, being more in keeping, produce a much stronger. And, moreover, this classic severity of form was quite unsuited to Mr. Arnold’s genius. Mr. Arnold, if one of the most sensitive, flexible and tender, is at the same time one of the most fitful and wayward of critics. The necessity of adhering closely to a rigid model must have been a veritable bondage to a man whose own excellence and whose estimate of excellence in others depends so entirely upon the mood of the moment.

  Sharing with the Preraphaelite order of poets the practice of Wordsworthian naturalism, Mr. Arnold also shares with Wordsworth such repute as a poet may get from dry sententiousness; while, in place of the medievalism that lends so much beauty to Preraphaelite poetry, he has taken to himself classic stock, and has thus earned for much of his work a high place in the Neo-Greek division of renaissance poetry. But to say that he is narrowly neo-classic would be false; for, while he has produced no poems more replete with the higher elements of poetry than many inspired by Greek themes and wrought more or less after Greek models, he has yet given us some gems that are beautiful among the most beautiful poetry of our day, and which have been caught up by his imagination in searching the great store-houses of Scandinavian and Asiatic myth and legend.

  “Merope” has that one fault against which the very gods, we are told, strive in vain. It is dull, and the seed of this dulness lay in the system on which it was written.

  Arnold’s circumstances have been more favorable than Hood’s, and in youth his mental discipline was thorough; yet the humorist was the truer poet, although three fourths of his productions never should have been written, and although there scarcely is a line of Arnold’s which is not richly worth preserving. It may be said of Hood that he was naturally a better poet than circumstances permitted him to prove himself; of Arnold, that through culture and good fortune he has achieved greater poetical successes than one should expect from his native gifts. His verse often is the result, not of “the first intention,” but of determination and judgment; yet his taste is so cultivated, and his mind so clear, that, between the two, he has o’erleapt the bounds of nature, and almost falsified the adage that a poet is born, not made…. Through the whole course of Arnold’s verse one searches in vain for a blithe, musical, gay, or serious off-hand poem…. Arnold has little quality or lightness of touch. His hand is stiff, his voice rough by nature, yet both are refined by practice and thorough study of the best models. His shorter metres, used as the framework of songs and lyrics, rarely are successful; but through youthful familiarity with the Greek choruses he has caught something of their irregular beauty.

  How to make a Poem like Mr. Matthew Arnold. Take one soulful of involuntary unbelief, which has been previously well flavored with self-satisfied despair. Add to this one beautiful text of Scripture. Mix these well together; and as soon as ebullition commences, grate in finely a few regretful allusions to the New Testament and the lake Tiberias, one constellation of stars, half-a-dozen allusions to the nineteenth century, one to Goethe, one to Mont Blanc, or the Lake of Geneva; and one also if possible, to some personal bereavement. Flavor the whole with a mouthful of “faiths” and “infinites,” and a mixed mouthful of “passions,” “finites,” and “yearnings.” This class of poem is concluded, usually, with some question, about which we have to observe only that it shall be impossible to answer.

  He is a maker of such exquisite and thoughtful verse that it is hard sometimes to question his title to be considered a genuine poet. On the other hand, it is likely that the very grace and culture and thoughtfulness of his style inspires in many the first doubt of his claim to the name of poet. Where the art is evident and elaborate, we are all too apt to assume that it is all art and not genius. Mr. Arnold is a sort of miniature Goethe; we do not know that his most ardent admirers could demand a higher praise for him, while it is probable that the description will suggest exactly the intellectual peculiarities which lead so many to deny him a place with the really inspired singers of his day.

  Have a simple austerity of style [Sonnets] which may almost be called ascetic.

  The volumes which contain the poems of Matthew Arnold are one of the priceless possessions of the English-speaking people. The critical perversity which causes their writer to see in Byron a greater poet than Shelley and in Wordsworth a greater than Hugo has not prevented him from making verse of his own, which, were not such comparisons of necessity futile, might fairly be compared with the nobler strains of Shelley and of Hugo. We have, indeed, the high authority of Mr. Swinburne for assigning to the “Thyrsis” the rank of the “Adonais,” and it might not be rash to say that such poems as “Dover Beach” and “Obermann” would not be unworthy of the author of “Contemplations” and the “Legende des Siècles.”

  Perhaps, when all is said, it remains the most noteworthy feature of Mr. Arnold’s poetical work that that work was never immature. And yet the poems were all, in some sort, early poems. Before their author had fully come to middle life he had virtually abandoned metrical expression. But the earliest among them, those distinctly marked as such, have none of the special faults of youth. There is no passion in them, as we have seen,—or next to none,—no hurry, no excess. They are grave, concise, philosophical, unsparingly pruned from the beginning, and untiringly polished. Such precocity is usually thought to foretell an early decline of mental vigor. It is all the more wonderful, therefore, as measuring Mr. Arnold’s vitality and versatility, that he should deliberately have unstrung his lyre only to enter with unsuspected energy into a new career, and win equal if not greater distinction as a writer of critical and didactic prose.

  In running one’s eye down the tables of contents of Mr. Arnold’s poetry, one is struck with the apparent tameness of them; the titles of the early and lyrical poems have the sobriety of the “Christian Year,” and in the narrative and dramatic poems, wide as is the range from sick Bokhara’s king to Balder dead, from the doomed Mycernius to the wounded Tristram “famous in Arthur’s court of old,” we find no choice of subjects where the thrilling and romantic are the leading motif. Supreme artist as he is, master of a style pure, chaste, and well-nigh as faultless as work of man can be, severe in its simplicity, simple also in the main are the materials. Even where they have a studied commonplace look, as in an early poem, “Lines Written in Kensington Gardens,” there the presence of genius is manifest in the uplifting of the simple and familiar to a higher level, in the suggestiveness which is never exhausted, in the hiding of power within restfulness. In truth the first impression which the poems themselves, sober in their colouring, scarce a ripple in their movement, playing on no passion, scorning all tricks and catches, frugal of metaphor and imagery, give, is one of disappointment…. A closer study of Mr. Arnold’s poetry deepens appreciation, and we are in the end held by an irresistible charm easy neither to describe nor to define…. No surer test of Mr. Arnold’s range and greatness and right assessment of men is supplied than in his elegiac poems. That on his friend Arthur Clough, entitled “Thyrsis,” is placed by Mr. Swinburne, in which estimate most readers will agree, in equal rank with the “Lycidas” of Milton and the “Adonais” of Shelley.

  In passing from the thinker to the poet, I am passing from a writer whose curious earnestness and ability in attempting the impossible, will soon, I believe, be a mere curiosity of literature, to one of the most considerable of English poets, whose place will probably be above any poet of the eighteenth century, excepting Burns, and not excepting Dryden, or Pope, or Cowper, or Goldsmith, or Gray; and who, even amongst the great poets of the nineteenth century, may very probably be accorded the sixth or fifth, or even by some the fourth place. He has a power of vision as great as Tennyson’s, though its magic depends less on the rich tints of association, and more on the liquid colours of pure natural beauty, a power of criticism and selection as fastidious as Gray’s, with infinitely more creative genius; and a power of meditative reflection which, though it never mounts to Wordsworth’s higher levels of genuine rapture, never sinks to his wastes and flats of commonplace. Arnold is a great elegiac poet, but there is a buoyancy in his elegy which we rarely find in the best elegy, and which certainly adds greatly to its charm. And though I cannot call him a dramatic poet, his permanent attitude being too reflective for any kind of action, he shows in such poems as the “Memorial Verses” on Byron, Goethe, and Wordsworth, in the “Sick King of Bokhara,” and “Tristram and Iseult,” great precision in the delineation of character, and not a little power even of forcing character to delineate itself.

  The chief qualities of his verse are clearness, simplicity, strong directness, noble and musical rhythm, and a certain intense calm.

  He is an academical poet, reflecting the mental attitude of the most cultured minds of his time, and also their obligations to antiquity and such moderns as Wordsworth and Goethe.

  Arnold’s verse resembles a crystal cup of some choice liquor, fit for the banquets of Olympus, one sip of which delights, but which never cloys or intoxicates, drink we never so deep. The secret of his style is after all its purity and simplicity. Clearness without literal precision is the effect for which he strives. The transparency is that of running water, rather than that of clear air. His words are well chosen, and chosen so as to produce an immediate and definite impression, avoiding the diffuseness and repetition which now and again disfigure his prose writings. Indeed, his verse appeals to a distinctly higher audience. His ideal of the dignify of his art impose upon him a self-restraint to which he adhered with singular fidelity. In his eyes poesy is too fine an instrument to be employed on trifles.

  If one were to write out of mere personal preference, and praise most that which best fits one’s private moods, I suppose I should place Mr. Matthew Arnold at the head of contemporary English poets. Reason and reflection, discussion and critical judgment, tell one that he is not quite there…. He has not that inspired greatness of Wordsworth, when nature does for him what his “lutin” did for Corneille, “takes the pen from his hand and writes for him.” But he has none of the creeping prose which, to my poor mind, invades even “Tintern Abbey.” He is, as Mr. Swinburne says, “The surest-footed” of our poets. He can give a natural and lovely life even to the wildest of ancient imaginings, as to “these bright and aged snakes, that once were Cadmus and Harmonia.”

  In matters of form this poet is no romancist but a classic to the marrow. He adores his Shakespeare, but he will none of his Shakespeare’s fashion. For him the essentials are dignity of thought and sentiment and distinction of manner and utterance. It is no aim of his to talk for talking’s sake, to express what is but half felt and half understood, to embody vague emotions and nebulous fancies in language no amount of richness can redeem from the reproach of being nebulous and vague. In his scheme of art there is no place for excess, however magnificent and Shakespearean—for exuberance, however overpowering and Hugoesque. Human and interesting in themselves, the ideas apparelled in his verse are completely apprehended; natural in themselves, the experiences he pictures are intimately felt and thoroughly perceived. They have been resolved into their elements by the operation of an almost Sophoclean faculty of selection, and the effect of their presentation is akin to that of a gallery of Greek marbles…. To me this last [“Balder Dead”] stands alone in modern art for simple majesty of conception, sober directness and potency of expression, sustained dignity of thought and sentiment and style, the complete presentation of whatever is essential, the stern avoidance of whatever is merely decorative, indeed, for every Homeric quality save rhythmical vitality and rapidity of movement.

  He was a poet when he wrote “Thyrsis” and “The Strayed Reveller.” He was no longer a poet when he perpetrated his verses in unrhymed Heinesque; when he compared the receding tide at Dover to the receding Sea of Faith, and could find nothing better to say of a sublime Humourist than that “the World smiled, and the smile was Heine.” This may be criticism of life, but it is neither poetry nor even decent imagery. Au reste, Mr. Arnold forgot that Poetry, so far from being a dilettante’s opinion or “criticism” of life, is the very Spirit of Life itself.

  It was Arnold’s work to find beauty and truth in life, to apprehend the meaning and moral worth of things, to discriminate the trivial from the grave, and to show how the serene and ardent life is better than the mean and restless.

  In the poetry of Matthew Arnold faith is but an artistic freak…. The English mind will never yield a wide attention to any modern Lucretius in the person of a Matthew Arnold, singing his despairing ode concerning “The Nature of Things.”

  Mr. Arnold is the last man in the world anybody would wish to shove out of his place. A poet at all points, armed cap-a-pie against criticism, like Lord Tennyson, he certainly was not. Nor had his verse any share of the boundless vitality, the fierce pulsation so nobly characteristic of Mr. Browning. But these admissions made, we decline to parley any further with the enemy. We cast him behind us. Mr. Arnold, to those who cared for him at all, was the most useful poet of his day. He lived much nearer us than poets of his distinction usually do. He was neither a prophet nor a recluse. He lived neither above us, nor away from us…. His verse tells and tingles…. His readers feel that he bore the same yoke as themselves. Theirs is a common bondage with his. Beautiful surpassingly beautiful some of Mr. Arnold’s poetry is, but we seize upon the thought first and, delight in the form afterwards…. What gives Arnold’s verse its especial charm is his grave and manly sincerity. He is a poet without artifice or sham. He does not pretend to find all sorts of meanings in all sorts of things. He does not manipulate the universe and present his readers with any bottled elixir.

  Arnold is a classic, but is he not at the foot of his class? Did ever poet before cast his thought into such perfect mould with so little fire to fuse his materials?

  The inspiration of Matthew Arnold’s verse is emotional and intellectual rather than spiritual.

  Not irony, however, but sighs and lamentations, would be the proper commentary on the gradual subsidence in him of the poetic impulse, were one forced to believe that it had ever been the one imperative force in his character and genius. A born poet he unquestionably was. But he was a born critic likewise. If the critical faculty could have been kept in the abeyance till his powers as a poet had reached maturity, it would have helped him to introduce criticism of life into his verse, without any injury to the latter. Unfortunately, the critical impulse was, from the very beginning, more powerful in him than the poetic impulse, the disposition to analyze and to teach more imperious than the promptness to feel and the tendency to sing. The consequence was he began to criticize life before he had lived, and to do that most difficult of all things, viz., give utterance to the Imaginative Reason before he had become master of the instrument of verse. I have heard a sincere admirer of him affirm that he never became quite master of that instrument, and though, if one may say so, one would endorse without qualification the unflattering estimate he invariably expressed of poetry which is all sound and colour, and conspicuously deficient in subject matter, one could hardly controvert the opinion that attributes to him, as a writer of verse, a frequent disregard of sensuous beauty. Moreover, it was because of this early development in him of the reasoning and moralizing faculty that his mastery over the instrument of verse was not unoften unsatisfactory. He laid too heavy a burden on his young muse, which never recovered from this premature forcing of its powers.

  The doctrine of Stoicism modified by a doctrine of culture is nobly preached in Matthew Arnold’s verse.

  I hear of a Penny Mat. Arnold published by Stead (!!). Is that possible? And to be followed by a Penny Clough! Did you ever? Is he publishing them in penny numbers? the whole to cost a lot? Or, positively, can we have Mat.—the whole unmutilated Mat.—for a penny? And by STEAD? Wonders will never cease. Fancy Mat., from that fair heaven which now holds his dainty ghost, stooping to sniff at this κνίση! sniff at—sniff is ambiguous, is it not? It is to be observed that men like Mat. have an odd way of generating bastards. On some raid into Philistia he must have captured a Dalilah and taken her to his tent. And this is characteristic of our time; the frontiers get blurred, our choicest and best, whose very defects, if they be defects, we might have imagined would save them from such unions, are occasionally to be seen surrounded by hangers-on, who are absolutely unworthy. What is it? Some kindly looseness in the great man? or merely impudence in the small one? However this may be, I never can get a clear view of a modern writer, especially an eminent one, by reason of the admirers and imitators who are his own spurious offspring. What a nimbus for a celebrity! The old men are full-orbed, serene, “fixed in their everlasting seats.” Now that is surely a glorious thing. There they are, the Classics. No one dreams of associating them with the feculent vulgar. No doubt we may impute a good deal of this ragamuffin salvage to the “spread of education,” to the smug conviction which every man seems to cherish that he is in the secret, or that there is no secret. And the pestilent error is encouraged by the reduction of genius to “the infinite capacity of taking pains,” by the insane idea that you can teach the “trick,” that literature is a trade, a kapelistic art, that “the all is in us all,” that there is no intellectual hierarchy, that the venerable Poeta nascitur non fit is venerable bosh—and a thousand and one heresies of the same “mak.” Hence it comes to pass that even a εὕζωνος like Mat. gets swaddled and swathed with these terrible integuments, the fine Greek limbs of him impeded by Barbarian braccae. Still one has the consolation of thinking that he must be amused when he beholds waving a censer in his temple such a high-priest as Stead—amused—yes, and note the shrinking nostril, how it curves!

  There is no Victorian poet, perhaps there is no Victorian thinker, more significant in position than Matthew Arnold. Agnosticism of thought and feeling, with all its vagueness, finds in him an exquisitely accurate exponent. No other poet has been so clear in his understanding of confusion, so positive in an unstable equilibrium. In the union of definiteness of technique with vagueness of theme the charm of his work resides. Unsatisfied desire, evasive regret, indecision, doubt, all that has not yet translated itself from the dim twilight of the feeling to the daylight world of the deed,—this Arnold gives us with delicate precision of touch. His poems are like gray shadows cast along some temple-floor, shadowy alike in clean purity of outline, and in dim uncertainty of content.

  His poetry had the classical spirit in a very peculiar and rare degree; and we can have little doubt now, when so much of Arnold’s prose work in criticism has been accepted as standard opinion, and so much of his prose work in controversy has lost its interest and savour, that it is his poetry which will be longest remembered, and there his finest vein was reached. It may be said that no poet in the roll of our literature, unless it be Milton has been so essentially saturated to the very bone with the classical genius…. His poetry, however, is “classical” only in a general sense, not that all of it is imitative of ancient models or has any affectation of archaism. It is essentially modern in thought, and has all that fetishistic worship of natural objects which is the true note of our Wordsworthian school…. Almost alone amongst our poets since Milton, Arnold is never incoherent, spasmodic, careless, washy, or banal. He never flies up into a region where the sun melts his wings; he strikes no discords, and he never tries a mood for which he has no gift. He has more general insight into the intellectual world of our age, and he sees into it more deeply and more surely than any contemporary poet…. As a poet, Arnold belongs to an order very rare with us, in which Greece was singularly rich, the order of gnomic poets, who condensed in metrical aphorisms their thoughts on human destiny and the moral problems of life. The type is found in the extant fragments of Solon, of Xenophanes, and above all of Theognis.

  His verse has everywhere the characteristic Greek signs—lucidity of thought, unity in design, reserve, fine taste, with propriety in choice of metre, crystal clearness in diction. If a certain coldness be sometimes felt, it is due to that over-didactic tendency, that want of disinterested feeling, which Arnold, in most ways so opposed, shares with Browning; nor was his overstrained value for criticism, of all pure literary forms the most transient, without a dampening effect on his own poetry. These conditions, of course, colour Arnold’s landscape. It is limited in range, reaching its admirable successes almost always in the idyllic style. His conception of the scene is transparently accurate; the pictures presented have much variety, and are always in due harmony with the subject.

  Mr. Arnold is on one side a poet of “correctness”—a new correctness as different from that of Pope as his own time, character, and cultivation were from Pope’s, but still correctness, that is to say a scheme of literature which picks and chooses according to standards, precedents, systems, rather than one which, given an abundant stream of original music and representation, limits the criticising province in the main to making the thing given the best possible of its kind…. And it is not a little curious that his own work, by no means always the best of its kind—that it would often be not a little the better for a stricter application of critical rules to itself. But when it is at its best it has a wonderful charm—a charm nowhere else to be matched among our dead poets of this century. Coleridge was perhaps, allowing for the fifty years between them, as good a scholar as Mr. Arnold, and he was a greater poet; but save for a limited time he never had his faculties under due command, or gave the best of his work. Scott, Byron, Keats, were not scholars at all; Shelley and Tennyson not critical scholars; Rossetti a scholar only in modern languages. And none of these except Coleridge, whatever their mere knowledge or instruction, had the critical vein, the knack of comparing and adjusting, at all strongly developed. Many attempts have been made at a formula of which the following words, are certainly not a perfect expression, that a poet without criticism is a failure, and that a critic who is a poet is a miracle. Mr. Arnold is beyond all doubt the writer who has most nearly combined the two gifts.

  Arnold’s permanent fame will rest rather on his poems than on his prose writings. In the coming generations, when the educational politics of our day shall have become obsolete and have ceased to interest men; when the ephemeral literature, the sociology, and the personal controversies have passed out of view, his name will stand out conspicuously with those of Tennyson and Browning, the three representative poets of the latter half of the nineteenth century. The future historian of literature who seeks a key to the moral condition of the England of our time, to its intellectual unrest, and to its spiritual aims and tendencies, will find it here.

  As a great elegiac poet, Matthew Arnold is the clearest exponent of the subjective aspect of the religious conflict of the Victorian era. He has helped the thinkers of his generation to find an utterance for their sadness; he has interpreted their feelings. This sadness, this conflict, he has said, is natural, it is not beyond explanation; and he has, in his later poems, expressed his hope of ultimate reconciliation between doubt and belief. No one has laid bare the “malady of the century” with keener insight than he.

  To-day his poetry is all of him that remains, and its charm is likely to soothe the more strenuous minds among us for at least another generation, and perhaps for all time.

  It may be said, indeed, that in Matthew Arnold we have, perhaps, the most perfect specimen of the classic style that the essentially Romantic bent of nineteenth-century English poetry could allow to exist and flourish in our literature. It is a style which as its judicious admirers admit, has, in modern hands at any rate, its weakness as well as its strength; and in the hands of Mr. Arnold the former quality was now and then more conspicuous than the latter. It betrayed him sometimes into a stiffness with which another and greater classic, Milton, is himself on occasion justly chargeable, and sometimes into a frigidity of which Milton is much more rarely guilty.

  On the whole, patience rather than hope or action was Arnold’s attitude; the tendency of his verse is certainly to depress, to banish hope, to benumb action.

  A narrative poem [“Sohrab and Rustum”] second in dignity to none produced in the nineteenth century.

  It is frequently and truly remarked of Arnold’s poetry that it never can be popular. But this is not because there is anything particularly esoteric about it, and the assumption that it appeals particularly to the elect, is largely unfounded. It is, at all events, better than that. It is not in the exclusive sense that Mr. Lang and Mr. Augustine Birrell find it intimately consoling. Others enjoy it in the same way, though, of course, whether or no in the same degree it would be impossible to determine. But it is poetry that never can be popular because it appeals to moods that are infrequent. It is intimately consoling if you are in a mood that needs consolation, and consolation of a severely stoic strain. Otherwise it is not.

General

  No one can charge Mr. Arnold with being the slave of a system. No one can say that he is fighting for an institution which has trained him into a prejudice in its own favor. No one can say that he has travelled so long in one deep-worn lane that he can only see what happens to be at its two ends. This is what people say or think when the clergy speak in enthusiastic terms of the Bible and of religion. But Mr. Arnold is a free lance, if anybody is. Mr. Arnold represents criticism and the critical school of thought, with a prominence at present which no other Englishman has gained. What man dares, he dares; and no fear of unpopularity, of present wrath, or of future punishment will deter him from saying what he thinks. He holds a pen, too, sharp as a bee’s sting, and wields it with wit, not to say humor, which most people call ill-natured, but which seems to us only the exuberance of a vigorous life.

  Our most brilliant literary critic.

  Mr. Arnold is a true poet, but he is intensely and profoundly ethical. He is seeking always the highest truth. He is bent on the wisest and most successful conduct of life. This is the sentiment and purpose which give unity to his poetry and prose more than the acuteness, the grace, the imagination, which are common to them both. But his work is far too large and varied to be summed in any formula.

  A large familiarity with foreign literature and Continental criticism has enabled Mr. Arnold to widen the scope of contemporary English literature…. He tried to raise criticism from its low estate—described by Wordsworth as “an inglorious employment.” It can hardly be denied that his efforts have been successful, and that we have now a more studious, learned, disinterested, and careful sort of reviewers than of old. Mr. Arnold tried his best to make critics feel that their duty is to see things as they are. A poet is now rarely reviled because his opinions, as a private citizen, are Radical, or Tory; because he lives at Hampstead, or in Westmoreland; because he goes to church, or stays away. A somewhat higher standard has been set, even for journey-men-work, and, as far as an English looker-on can judge, American literature, too, has benefited by this increased earnestness of purpose, and this growing desire for wider and clearer knowledge.

  While so much that is effective in Mr. Arnold’s writings is generally attributed to his culture, I am confident that without his rare nature—what is it but genius?—mere culture would have left him mechanical, brassy, insipid, where he is now vital, sweet, profound. He always has something to say, which is Carlyle’s first requisite for good writing. But his literary art is masterly. His sentences are clear-cut, statuesque in their elaboration, not a word in them can be changed but to their detriment,—and yet they are limpid, crisp, graceful, strong, charged to the full with thought. And then, too, with his positive convictions and robust vigor, how delicately he handles the subtlest themes! How large and sustained his movement; how sure his grip; how imperial, without bluster or arrogance, his authority! I cannot express my admiration of his fluent, virile, precise style, his scope and insight, his wisdom, moderation, catholicity, and illuminating interpretation, without seeming to exaggerate his quality as a writer and his virtues as a man. Amid a Babel of noises and factions, he stands calm, judicial, self-contained; and minds that hate shams and love truth and beauty are reassured by his example and inspiration.

  I have wished to praise, to express the high appreciation of all those who in England and America have in any degree attempted to care for literature. They owe Matthew Arnold a debt of gratitude for his admirable example, for having placed the standard of successful expression, of literary feeling and good manners, so high. They never tire of him—they read him again and again. They think the wit and humour of “Friendship’s Garland” the most delicate possible, the luminosity of “Culture and Anarchy” almost dazzling, the eloquence of such a paper as the article on Lord Falkland in the “Mixed Essay” irresistible. They find him, in a word, more than any one else, the happily-proportioned, the truly distinguished man of letters. When there is a question of his efficacy, his influence, it seems to me enough to ask one’s self what we should have done without him, to think how much we should have missed him, and how he has salted and seasoned our public conversation. In his absence the whole tone of discussion would have seemed more stupid, more literal. Without his irony to play over its surface, to clip it here and there of its occasional fustiness, the life of our Anglo-Saxon race would present a much greater appearance of insensibility.

  Mr. Matthew Arnold is indeed a writer who speaks with a great deal of authority. He has a strong positive spirit. The strength of that positive spirit is all the more evident from the fact that it has been hindered by that sympathetic discouragement of which he so often speaks. His mind has been very open to impressions from certain authors, and indeed from men in general. And it appears to have been his disposition to regard others as more enviable than himself…. This constitutional confidence was of great artistic use to him in his younger days. The charming poems which he wrote at that period appear, many of them, and some of the best, to have been regarded by the poet himself quite as much as statements of truth as expressions of art. He will not write unless he has a substantial poetical thought to express. It would be well if all poets knew equally well when not to speak…. In his writings upon other than literary subjects Mr. Arnold is better the nearer he keeps to the description of human nature…. Mr. Arnold’s writings have been widely read here. They have a natural relationship to this country. He is an admirer of democracy, and has thought a great deal about the future of human character and society. His interest in the future is indeed one of his peculiarities.

  No injustice is done to Mr. Arnold in saying that condescension in the form of superciliousness more or less infects his ablest writings. He is very careful to abstain from every kind of that passionate invective, of that righteous wrath, in which vehement minds are apt to indulge when their souls are excited by the contemplation of some great wrong; there is hardly a trace in his works of the nobler age so dominant in Milton, Chatham, or Burke; but on the other hand, there is no recent English writer who excels or even equals him in the exquisitely polished poison with which he deliberately tips the light and shining arrows of his sarcasm. The wounds he inflicts may seem to be a mere scratch on the surface; but they fester; they eat into the flesh, which they hardly seem to touch; and the dull and prolonged pain they cause is as hard to bear as the sting of a scorpion or the bite of a centipede…. The prose of Mr. Arnold, when he is in his best mood, almost realizes his ideal of what he calls the Attic style, having its “warm glow, blithe movement, and soft pliancy of life.” Take such an essay as that on “Religious Sentiment,” and it seems, as we read, that it cannot be improved. In some of his theological and political discussions his style, it must be confessed, loses much of its charm. It is important, however, to discriminate between listening to Mr. Arnold and reading him.

  To speak with perfect frankness, it seems to me that Mr. Arnold’s one weak point as critic is a tendency to over-fastidiousness.

  Matthew Arnold was a polished scholar, but as a heathen might be so. He was a heathen, and he knew the heathen. He was more at home among the heathen than in Christian society; and this is a trait of his class. Knowing the heathen better than the Christian and having more affection for him, and knowing his difficulties better than the Christian’s, he could but say in answer to the question, What is highest good? “A stream of tendency which makes for righteousness.” An easy way to let a man down, who wants to go down, by a pretty phrase.

  Few men, if any, whom death could have taken from us would have been more perceptibly missed by a wider range of friends and readers than Mr. Matthew Arnold. Other men survive who command a more eager enthusiasm, or who are more actively important to the work of the world. But hardly any man was present in so many cultivated minds as an element of interest in life, an abiding possibility of stimulating and fruitful thought. His criticism of books and of life found wider acceptance in the English-speaking world than that offered by any other writer; and even the slight affectations or idiosyncrasies of his pellucid style have become so associated with the sense of intellectual enjoyment that few readers wished them away…. His business and achievements, indeed, were widely spread. He was an inspector of schools, a literary, social, and political essayist, a religious reformer, and a poet. To the first of these pursuits, widening into the study of state education generally, he probably gave the largest proportion of his time, and he became one of the most accomplished specialists in that direction whom England possessed; in the second pursuit he was the most brilliantly successful; to the third, as I believe, he devoted the most anxious and persistent thought; and by the fourth pursuit, as a poet, he will, we cannot doubt, be the longest remembered.

  Arnold is preëminently a critical force, a force of clear reason and of steady discernment. He is not an author whom we read for the man’s sake or for the flavor of his personality, for this is not always agreeable, but for his unfailing intelligence and critical acumen; and because, to borrow a sentence of Goethe, he helps us to “attain certainty and security in the appreciation of things exactly as they are.” Everywhere in his books we are brought under the influence of a mind which indeed does not fill and dilate us, but which clears our vision, which sets going a process of crystallization in our thoughts, and brings our knowledge, on a certain range of subjects, to a higher state of clearness and purity.

  Mr. Matthew Arnold, indeed, master of all literary arts, was highly skilful in the use of the Preface, which, in his hands, served to drive home the bolt of his argument, and to rivet it firmly on the other side. Those who have read one of Mr. Arnold’s prefaces know what to expect, and fall to, with increased appetite, on the book itself.

  He did more to inculcate in the minds of English-speaking people a love for Literature for the sake of itself than any other man living or dead. He was a poet, but not a great one. He cultivated the art of using words to the utmost extent possible in a man of his temperament. He wrote at times exquisitely. He was an intellectual aristocrat, and we cannot but admire the position he took above all low, vulgar and common things. But, nevertheless, his lifelong cultivation of the art of literature led to nothing, because it did not lead to God.

  Mr. Arnold justly earned the thanks of this generation for the soundness of his judgments on questions of taste and for the clearness with which he delivered them. It is not to be denied, however, that his powers of lucid and felicitous expression frequently led him into the dangerous habit of substituting phrases for reasoning; and this tendency is nowhere more manifest than in the Preface which he contributed to Mr. Humphry Ward’s “English Poets” published in 1880.

  When all has been said, there is not to be found in modern time such a body of literary criticism as that which Mr. Arnold has left us. In no other writer of our time is there to be found so much strong sense, keen insight, subtle yet lucid analysis, calm unimpassioned judgment, feeling for humour, for pathos, for noble poetry, and high imagination clothed in a style which needed only an occasional rise into the eloquence of passionate and ringing oratory to be quite perfect. The absence of this swing and fervour has been noted as a defect; perhaps it is so; perhaps its presence would have been inconsistent with the graceful quiet playful flow of his limpid sentences. Yet his quiet was not the quiet of weakness or indecision. When he condemns these passages in the life of Shelley and his friends which no one but an infatuated idolater can defend, or speaks of the coarse brutalities of Milton’s polemics as any one who has read them (except Lord Macaulay) must in his heart admit that they deserve, he does so in stinging language, which leaves no doubt as to his own stern disapprobation and unqualified dislike. Where all is excellent it is difficult to select, and of the literary papers of Mr. Arnold there is not one which should remain unread.

  As a critic Mr. Arnold has been compared to Sainte-Beuve, for whom he had a great admiration, and who spoke of him to me with much respect, and no doubt he had some of the merits of that eminent man, with a total absence of his moral defects. Mr. Arnold’s method, however, was very different, and to my thinking not so good. The method indeed of Sainte-Beuve seems to me quite perfect, and he gave to criticism the kind of continuous and all-engrossing toil which a Q.C. in immense practice gives to his profession. Towards the latter part of his life indeed, before he became a senator, I have reason to think that he gave more, and that he found his labours terribly wearing. Mr. Arnold’s critical papers were merely essays written in the intervals of business, and, excellent as they are, would probably have been better, as well as more numerous, if he had been able to devote a larger part of his energies to them.

  Arnold intended to designate, or at least to convey, something peculiar to his own conception,—not strictly related to literature at all, it may be, but more closely tied to society in its general mental activity. In other words, Arnold was a critic of civilization more than of books, and aimed at illumination by means of ideas. With this goes his manner—that habitual air of telling you something which you did not know before, and doing it for your good, which stamps him as a preacher born. Under the mask of the critic is the long English face of the gospeler; that type whose persistent physiognomy was never absent from the conventicle of English thought.

  Insight, appreciation, patience—these are the qualities that stamp the born critic, and so intrinsically was Arnold a critic, that he seized not only the livery but the secret of the creators, and advanced himself far along their own lines…. Much of Arnold’s poetry is but thrice-refined criticism, trebly refined pessimistic criticism; and the portion of it that is pure poetry is not song. The born critic could not learn the born poet’s lay; but he could rise to noble verse, indeed to as noble verse of the kind as we have in the language…. If Arnold does not greatly impress us as a poet, the moment we meet him as a critic we are in the presence of a master.

  This book, [“Friendship’s Garland”] published when Arnold was filling the mouths of men with his paradoxical utterances, lighted up all through with such wit and charm of style as can hardly, of its kind, be paralleled in recent prose; a masterpiece, not dealing with remote or abstruse questions, but with burning matters of the day—this entertaining and admirably modern volume enjoyed a sale which would mean deplorable failure in the case of a female novelist of a perfectly subterranean order.

  No recent English critic, I think, has approached him in the art of giving delicate portraits of literary leaders; he has spoken, for example, precisely the right word about Byron and Wordsworth. Many of us who cannot rival him may gain, from Arnold’s writings a higher conception of what is our true function. He did, I think, more than any man to impress upon his countrymen that the critic could not be a mere combatant in a series of faction fights, puffing friends and saying to an enemy, “This will never do.” The weak side, however, of the poetical criticism is its tendency to be “subjective,” that is, to reflect too strongly the personal prejudices of the author.

  Arnold’s paragraphs, while they have not the very highest variety in unity, do have admirable measure and proportion. The paragraph is usually loose, with an introductory sentence of transition. A large proportion are deductive: Arnold loved to regard the paragraph as a means of illustrating a general rule—he was not particular to advance a large body of particulars and base an induction upon these…. The coherence of Arnold’s paragraphs is well-nigh perfect in its way. It arises primarily from an oral structure—a close logical method, redintegrating in idea, slightly aggregating in sentence.

  Arnold may have differed from his father about Celt and Saxon, and about a hundred other things, and some of them were important things in the eyes of both of them; but to his father he did no doubt owe that point of fundamental resemblance which made them both take the social view of human life and duty. That Matthew will live by his verse, and not by his prose, does not affect the fact that the mainspring of his activity was his sense of the use and necessity of England as a great force in the world, and his conviction that she could not exert this force effectively or wisely until her educational system had been vivified, her ideas of conduct and character clarified and widened, and all her standards of enlightenment raised. For this literature was to be the great instrument. But along with literature, organisation.

  Nature, for instance, plainly intended that Matthew Arnold should not write elegant prose, and she absolutely forbade him to write poetry, yet he succeeded in doing both.

  Few Englishmen of the nineteenth century have been so sincere and so outspoken in their criticism of their contemporaries. Matthew Arnold was often wrong, both in his premises and his conclusions; but he was always truthful and conscientious. Of some subjects he had a profound knowledge; for example, he had made a thorough study of Homer, and of Greek literature generally. He also devoted much attention to the literary aspect of the Bible. Not only was he a true apostle of culture, but the most catholic-minded and cosmopolitan of English writers…. He was a man of childlike and affectionate nature, and yet the possessor of an intellect which could appreciate the literatures of all nations. He was entirely free from Anglo-Saxon insularity. He lashed with refined sarcasm the smug self-complacency of the British Philistine, and made the “vulgar-mindedness” of the middle-class so odious that the best amongst them have, by this time, learned to be ashamed of their own sordid vices and almost equally sordid virtues. In many respects he was, perhaps, hypercritical. He always loved to praise the French, and to declare that they are superior to the English…. Matthew Arnold, classical as his poetry is in form and in its ideals, is, as a critic, the most modern of moderns. He was rather an interpreter of the spirit of the age than a prophet or a leader. If he lacked Carlyle’s colossal force, he was free from that great writer’s gloomy pessimism and love of vituperation. As a poet he may rank after Tennyson and Browning, and in some respects his poetry is more inspiring than that of his two illustrious contemporaries. Misunderstood and censured by the champions of orthodox literality, he was really one of the most religious-minded of men. He taught his fellow-countrymen to associate happiness, and not misery, with righteousness. It was a lesson which England had need to learn.

  The amount of direct information that we derive from Matthew Arnold, for instance, is usually small; his opinions often miss our acceptance; and yet no student can follow his thought through many pages without a distinct gain in that which Arnold so strenuously battled for, genuine culture.

  Arnold’s influence upon the religious views of English-speaking Protestants it would be difficult to exaggerate. We live too near his day, perhaps, to gauge the force of that influence with accuracy, but that it was a wide-spread and destructive influence cannot be denied. He was undoubtedly one of the most insidious enemies of “Orthodox” Protestantism—that is, the school of Protestant Christianity which has clung to a more or less vague notion of the Incarnation—that the century has produced. A champion of the Established Church of England as against the dissenting sects, the manner and grounds of that defence were of a nature to horrify all except the haziest minds among Broad-church Anglicans. His conception of the Christian religion bore the same relation to the dogmatic faith of the historic church that the light of the moon bears to the sun’s brilliancy and heat. Clear, pale, cold—it was a reflected light, as wanting in warmth as the moon’s rays; the best it may accomplish is to illumine the wayfarer’s pathway enough to aid him in avoiding the pitfalls of ignorance and lust; but its faint glimmer guides his steps to the brink of blank infidelity, and then the pale rays fade into blackest night. His religion was the logical outcome of the latitudinarian views of his father…. He was of too fine a cultivation, and of too cosmopolitan a type, to fall into the vulgarisms regarding the church so rife in the published thought of otherwise scholarly American non-Catholics—men whose Rome-hating, Reformation-lauding traditions lead them into strangely narrow and crooked pathways of vilification.

  While Matthew Arnold travelled a long way beyond his father’s theological ceremonies, and was certainly not opposed to the emancipation of the Jews, he inherited and adopted Dr. Arnold’s invincible faith in truth, righteousness, and innocence. No line of his poetry suggests anything but what is lovely and of good report. No act of his life would have been condemned by the puritan rigor of his father. From his father also he derived much of his inbred taste and literary sense. Dr. Arnold’s style is always lucid, dignified, and impressive. His mind was steeped in that standard and touchstone of perfection, the literature of Athens. Plato and Thucydides were the favorites of the father; Homer and Sophocles of the son. Greece is justified of her children.

  It was through his writings alone that he wished all biographical hints to be made accessible to the great reading public, and so left it on record that no life of him should be written. And yet, in reading the works of a favourite author, we wish at times to have some more commonplace account of his everyday life and character with which to compare the ideal biography of him which has been insensibly forming itself in our minds. His works, especially his poetry—if he be a poet—are the outcome of some rare moments of spiritual insight; of some mood of suspense, or joy, or sorrow; of some delicate handling of a pressing intellectual problem; and our indebtedness to them for the furtherance of our deepest and truest life only serves to increase the personal interest felt for the author, and makes us wish for a more detailed account of his life than those indirect hints which his literary productions can suggest. And of such an account, in spite of the fact that no regular biography is to be written, we are not deprived in the case of Matthew Arnold, whose letters, published in two volumes, exhibit the writer in an admirable light as a most devoted son and brother, husband and father, and a perfectly charming friend to those whose correspondence with him has found a place in these volumes.

  There are probably few readers of the critical literature of the times who do not recur again and again to Matthew Arnold’s criticism, not only for the charm of the style, but for the currents of vital thought which it holds. One may not always agree with him, but for that very reason he will go back to see how it is possible to differ from a man who sees so clearly and feels so justly. Of course Arnold’s view is not final, any more than is that of any other man; but it is always fit, and challenges your common sense. After the muddle and puddle of most literary criticism, the reader of Arnold feels like a traveler who has got out of the confusion of brush and bog into clean and clear open spaces, where the ground is firm, and where he can see his course. “Where trees grow biggest,” says Emerson, “the huntsman finds the easiest way;” and for a similar reason the way is always easy and inviting through Arnold’s pages.

  He had given vogue to modes of thought and judgment which were once rare amongst Englishmen. He would have disclaimed, with some repugnance, the suggestion that he had a method. But if he had not a method, he had a mystery, an open secret, the habit of seeing every object before him in a perspective of wide culture and observation.

  As a writer upon morals and politics, he is characterized by the spirit of “sweetness and light,” with a purpose to make reason and the will of God prevail. The results of his work are exceedingly great.

  We admit fairly and freely that Mr. Arnold is a teacher, if not of truth, at least of half truths, and those of a very valuable kind. Indeed, could we but once convince ourselves, or become convinced, that the other half were already adequately taught and acted on, and that there is much danger of there being really too much taught, as Mr. Arnold maintains, we should be happy to adopt his theory, if not his application of it. His real fault is that in his laudable anxiety to propagate “Hellenism,” “spontaneity of consciousness,” “the desirability of a free play of thought on our stock notions,” and so forth, he lamentably under-rates the value of the other great means towards the attainment of perfection which he calls “Hebraism,” and which consists mainly in the development of the moral side of man’s nature and the striving to reduce at once to practice whatever of light a man may have.

  Perhaps the most important utterance [“Essay in Criticism”] upon criticism in modern times.

  Some ten years ago, a band of self-appointed defenders of America and its institutions undertook to drive Matthew Arnold out of court with clubs and tomahawks. He was a snob, an aristocrat, an ignoramus, knowing nothing of American institutions and not much of anything else, without the ability even to use the English language correctly, on the hypothesis that he had anything to say. But such attacks really did more good than harm, since they convinced the judicious that the critic’s verdict, “Thou ailest here, and here,” was timely and well-grounded; and an increasing number of Americans went on reading Mr. Arnold’s works with profit and enjoyment…. One who reads him with care can see that he has no quarrel with those who can base upon the data at hand a more comprehensive belief than his. He is to be read, then, not for detailed information as to what one should believe and what reject in religious matters, but to place the curb of intelligent discrimination upon one’s belief, and especially to check the habit of demanding of them that are weak in the faith tests that are not fundamentally necessary and are sure to repel.

  If a single word could resume him, it would be “academic;” but, although this perfectly describes his habitual attitude even as a poet, it leaves aside his chaste diction, his pictorial vividness, and his overwhelming pathos. The better, which is also the larger, part of his poetry is without doubt immortal. His position is distinctly independent, while this is perhaps less owing to innate originality than to the balance of competing influences. Wordsworth saves him from being a mere disciple of Goethe, and Goethe from being a mere follower of Wordsworth. As a critic he repeatedly evinced a happy instinct for doing the right thing at the right time. Apart from their high intellectual merits, the seasonableness of the preface to the poems of 1853, of the lectures on Homer, and those on the Celtic spirit, renders these monumental in English literature. His great defect as a critic is the absence of a lively æsthetic sense; the more exquisite beauties of literature do not greatly impress him unless as vehicles for the communication of ideas.

  Doubtless in spite of having been perhaps prematurely disseminated he will be preserved and handed on to Bacon’s “next ages.” There is certainly enough pollen in his essays to flower successively in many seasons and as long as the considerations to which he consecrated his powers interest readers who care also for clear and charming and truly classic prose…. He had, it is true, a remarkable gift for analysis—witness his Emerson, his clairvoyant separation of the strains of Celtic, Greek, Teutonic inspiration in English poetry, his study of Homeric translation, his essays on Keats and Gray. But in spite of his own advocacy of criticism as the art of “seeing the object as in itself it really is,” and his assertion that “the main thing is to get one’s self out of the way and let humanity judge,” he was himself never content with this. He is always concerned with the significance of the object once clearly perceived and determined. And though he never confuses the judgment of humanity (to use his rather magniloquent expression) by argumentation and special pleading, his treatment of his theme is to the last degree idiosyncratic…. It is obvious, therefore, that his criticism differs in kind from that of other writers. It differs especially from that most in vogue at the present time. It is eminently the antithesis of impressionist criticism. It has behind it what may fairly pass for a body of doctrine, though a body of doctrine as far as possible removed from system and pedantry.

  Arnold’s prose has little trace of the wistful melancholy of his verse. It is almost always urbane, vivacious, light-hearted. The classical bent of his mind shows itself here, unmixed with the inheritance of romantic feeling which colors his poetry. Not only is his prose classical in quality, by virtue of its restraint, of its definite aim, and of the dry white light of intellect which suffuses it; but the doctrine which he spent his life in preaching is based upon a classical ideal, the ideal of symmetry, wholeness, or, as he daringly called it, perfection.

  If he had never written prose the world would never have known him as a humorist. And that would have been an intellectual loss not easily estimated. How pure, how delicate, yet how natural and spontaneous his humour was, his friends and associates knew well; and … the humour of his writings was of exactly the same tone and quality as the humour of his conversation. It lost nothing in the process of transplantation. As he himself was fond of saying, he was not a popular writer, and he was never less popular than in his humorous vein. In his fun there is no grinning through a horse-collar, no standing on one’s head, none of the guffaws, and antics, and “full-bodied gaiety of our English Cider-Cellar.” But there is a keen eye for subtle absurdity, a glance which unveils affectation and penetrates bombast, the most delicate sense of incongruity, the liveliest disrelish for all the moral and intellectual qualities which constitute the Bore, and a vein of personal raillery as refined as it is pungent. Sydney Smith spoke of Sir James Mackintosh as “abating and dissolving pompous gentlemen with the most successful ridicule.” The words not inaptly describe Arnold’s method of handling personal and literary pretentiousness.