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. NADAL, E. S., 1884, Matthew Arnold, The Critic, vol. 2, p. 135. 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.-WHIPPLE, EDWIN PERCY, 1884, Matthew Arnold, North American Review, vol. 138, pp. 433, 441. To speak with perfect frankness, it seems to me that Mr. Arnold's one weak point as critic is a tendency to over-fastidiousness. -DOYLE, SIR FRANCIS HASTINGS, 1886, Reminiscences and Opinions, p. 182. Matthew Arnold was a polished scholar, He was a He but as a heathen might be so. Past in a moment; passed away, The thought that struck-the wit that played A throbbing pulse of English thought, HERMAN, 1888, Matthew Few men, if any, whom death could have taken from us would have been more persceptibly 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.-MYERS, FREDERIC W. H., 1888, Matthew Arnold, Fortnightly Review, vol. 49, p. 719. Arnold is preeminently 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.-BURROUGHS, JOHN, 1888, Matthew Arnold's Criticism, Century Magazine, vol. 36, p. 185. 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. MATTHEWS, BRANDER, 1888, Pen and Ink, p. 50. 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. -EGAN, MAURICE FRANCIS, 1889, Lectures on English Literature, p. 1. 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.-COURTHOPE, WILLIAM JOHN, 1889, The Life of Alexander Pope, Pope's Works, ed. Elwin and Courthope, vol. V, p. 377. 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.— COLERIDGE, JOHN DUKE LORD, 1889, Matthew Arnold, New Review, vol. 1, p. 218. 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 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.-DUFF, MOUNTSTUART E. GRANT, 1890, Matthew Arnold's Writings, Murray's Magazine, vol. 7, p. 301. 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.-CHENEY, JOHN VANCE, 1891, The Golden Guess, pp. 80, 81, 83. 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 volume enjoyed a sale which would mean deplorable failure in the case of a female novelist of a perfectly subterranean order. 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 civiliza--this entertaining and admirably modern tion 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 be--GOSSE, EDMUND, 1891, The Influence of fore, 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.-WOODBERRY, GEORGE EDWARD, 1890-1900, Makers of Literature, p. 3.. But he preserved from chance control And set his heart upon the goal, With those Elect he shall survive Spirits with whom the stars connive WATSON, WILLIAM, 1890, In Laleham 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 Democracy, Questions at Issue, p. 60.. 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.STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1893, Matthew Arnold, National Review, vol. 22, p. 465. 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.-LEWIS, EDWIN HERBERT, 1894, The History of the English Paragraph, pp. 163, 164. 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 enlightment raised. For this literature was to be the great instrument. But along with literature, organisation.-MORLEY, JOHN, 1895, Matthew Arnold, Nineteenth Century, vol. 38, p. 1049. 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.-BATES, ARLO, 1896, Talks on Writing English, p. 88. Few Englishmen of the nineteenth century have been so sincere and so outspoken in their critisicm 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 AngloSaxon insularity. He lashed with refined sarcasm the smug self-complacency of the British Philistine, and made the "vulgarmindedness" 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.-HANNIGAN, D. F., 1896, Matthew Arnold's Letters, Westminster Review, vol. 145, pp. 40, 42. 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 strenouosly battled for, genuine culture. -KOOPMAN, HARRY LYMAN, 1896, The Mastery of Books, p. 33. 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 Broadchurch 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, Reformationlauding traditions lead them into strangely narrow and crooked pathways of vilification. MORSE, CHARLES A. L., 1896, Matthew Arnold's Letters, Catholic World, vol. 63, pp. 491, 493. 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.-PAUL, HERBERT WOODFIELD, 1896, Matthew Arnold's Letters, The Forum, vol. 20, p. 630. 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.—FISHER, CHARLES, 1897, Matthew Arnold as seen through his Letters, Gentleman's Magazine, vol. 283, pp. 492, 495. 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.-BURROUGHS, JOHN, 1897, On the Re-reading of Books, Century Magazine, vol, 55, p. 149. He had given vogue to modes of thought and judgment which were once rare amongst He would have disclaimed, Englishmen. 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 obserReviews vation.-TOVEY, DUNCAN C., 1897, and Essays in English Literature, p. 71. 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 |