Matthew Arnold

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e. Some artificiality of manner was sometimes attributed to him, I think rather unjustly; but he certainly had "tricks and manners" of the kind very natural to men of decided idiosyncrasy, unless they transcend all mere trick, after the fashion which we know in Scott, which we are sure of, without knowing, in Shakespeare. One of these Mr George Russell glances at in the preface to the Letters, a passage which I read with not a little amusement, because I could confirm it from a memory of my only conversation with Mr Arnold. He had been

-writing is not a mere phrase, it is a fact. Has any of my readers many-or any-correspondents like Scott or like Southey, like Lamb or like FitzGerald, like Madame de Sévigné or like Lady Mary? He is lucky if he has. Indeed, the simplicity of the Letters is the very surest evidence of a real simplicity in the nature. In the so-called best letter-writers it may be shrewdly suspected that this simplicity is, with rare exceptions, absent. Scott had it; but then Scott's genius as a novelist overflowed into his letters, as did Southey's talent of universal writing, and Lamb's unalterable quintessence of quaintness. But though I will allow no one to take precedence of me as a champion of Madame de Sévigné, I do not think that simplicity is exactly the note of that beautiful and gracious person; it is certainly not that of our own Lady Mary, or of Horace Walpole, or of Pope, or of Byron. Some of these, as we know, or suspect

upulous. It is not an absolutely unknown thing to hear men boast of getting through their work somehow or other, that they may devote themselves to parerga which they like, and which they are pleased to consider more dignified, more important, nearer the chief end of man. And from the extremely common assumption that other people, whether they confess this or not, act upon it, one may at least not uncharitably suppose that a much larger number would so act if they dared, or had the opportunity. This was not Mr Arnold's con

ce from fads, and flights, and flings. Faint and far-off suggestions of the biographer of Arminius may, indeed, by a very sensitive reader, be discovered in the slightly eccentric suggestion that the Latin of the Vulgate (of which Mr Arnold himself was justly fond) should be taught in primary schools, and in the rather perverse coupling of "Scott and Mrs Hemans." But these are absolutely the only approaches to naughtiness in the whole volume. It is a real misfortune that the nature of the subject should make readers of the book unlikely to be ever numerous; for it supplies a side of its author's character no

is important to his character; and the character of the work itself colours very importantly, and, as we have seen, not perhaps always to unmitigated advantage, the nature of h

dmittedly of an older creation, has always been held; and here, as elsewhere, I am not careful to attempt innovation. In fact, though it may seem unkind to say so, it may be suspected that nobody has ever tried to elevate the function of the prose-writer above that of the poet, unl

-like that of Gray. The poet has in him a vein, or, if the metaphor be preferred, a spring, of the most real and rarest poetry. But the vein is constantly broken by faults, and never very thick; the spring is intermittent, and runs at times by drops only. There is always, as it were, an effort to get it to yield freely, to run clear and constant. And-again as in the case of Gray-the poet subjects himself to a further disability by all manner of artificial restrictions, struggles to comply with this or that system, theories, formulas, tricks. He wil

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passes the test. The things mentioned above and others, even many others, are the right things. They do not need the help of that rotten reed, the subject, to warrant and support them; we know that they are in accordance with the great masters, but we do not care whether

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ingly yet so easily accommodated to the general tone and motive of the piece,-these and a hundred other things fulf

ich poetry and poetry alone confers upon the fit readers of it-is never far off or absent for long together in Mr Arnold's verse. His command of it is indeed uncertain. But all over his work, from The Strayed Reveller to Westminster Abbey, it may happen at any minu

gian "drabness" by the efforts of Johnson, Gibbon, and Burke, but not proceeding to the extremes of any of the three, was still the academic standard; but when a certain freedom on the one side, and a certain grace and colour on the other, were being taken from the new experiments of nineteenth-century prose proper. Whether he or his contemporary Mr Froude was the greatest master of this particular blend is a question which no doubt had best be answered by the individual taste of the competent. I should say myself that Mr Froude at certain moments rose higher than Mr Arnold ever did; nothing of the latter's can approach that magnificent passage

nold's style was of a curiously fascinating character. I have often thought that, in the good sense of that unlucky word "genteel," this style deserves it far more than the style either of Shaftesbury or of Temple; while in its different and nineteenth-century way, it is as much a model of the "middle" style, neither very plain nor very ornate, but "elegant," as Addison's own. Yet it is observable that all the three writers just mentioned keep their place, except with deliberate students of the subject, rather by courtesy or prescription than by actual conviction and relish on the part of readers: and it is possible that something of the same kind may happen in Mr Arnold's case also, when his claims come to be considered by other generations from the merely formal point of view. Nor can those claims be said to be very securely based in respect of matter. It is impossible to be

stence of such an edition, even before his death, was part cause, and a large part of the cause, of the great and continued popularity of De Quincey; and it is a thousand pities that, before a generation arises which knows him not, Mr Arnold is not allowed the same chance. As it is, not a little of his work has never been reprinted at all; some of the rest is difficult of access, and what there is exists in numerous volumes of different forms, some cheap, some dear, the whole cumbersome. And if his prose work seems to me inferior to his poetical in absolute and perennial value, its value is still very great. Not so much English prose has that character of grace, of el

same keenness of delight with which we read him in poetry; but he will yield delight more surely. His manner, except in his rare "thorn-crackling" mo

t, Dryden is blunt and unscholarly; beside his directness of aim, if not always of achievement, his clearness of vision, his almost business-like adjustment of effort to result, the vagueness and desultoriness of Coleridge look looser and, in the literary sense, more disreputable than ever. Here was a man who could not only criticise but create; who, though he may sometimes, like others, have convicted his preaching of falsity by his practice, and his practice of sin by his preaching, yet could in the main make practice and preaching fit together. Here was a critic against whom the foolish charge, "You can break

isunderstanding, against mushroom rivalry, he championed her alike. And it was most certainly from no base motive. If he wanted an English Academy, I am quite sure it was not from any desire for a canary ribbon or a sixteen-pointed star. Yet, after Southey himself in the first half of the century, who has done so much for letters qua letters as Mr Arnold in the second? His poems were never popular, and he tried no other of the popular departments of literature. But he wrote, and I think he could write, nothing that was not literature, in and by the fact that he was its writer. It has been observed of others in other kinds, that somehow or other, by merely living, by pursuing their own arts or crafts whatever they were, they raised those arts and crafts in dignity, they bestowed on them as it were a rank, a position. A few-a very fe

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too grateful to Mr. T.B. Smart's Bibliography of Matthew

ess I mistake, a "kempshott," "campshed," or "campshedding" is not a landing-stage (though it helps to make o

other Poems. By John Campbel

nnyson, even of Thackeray; the obstinate refusal to give Browning, even after Bells and Pomegranates, a fair hearing; the recalcitrance to Carlyle among the elder, and Mr Ruskin among the younger, innovators in prose; the rejection of a book of erratic genius like Lavengro; the ignoring of wo

"undertone," as M

in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done. In such situations there

ter desponds exactly as you

East and West Ridings. This apparently impossible range had its monstrosity reduced by the limitation of his inspectorship to Nonconformist schools of other denominations than the Roman Catholic, especially Wesleyan and the then powerful "British" schools. As the schools multiplied the district was reduced, and at last he had Westminster only; but the exclusion of Anglican and Roman

20th of January in London without moving, then for a week to Huntingdonshir

but I am not writing French, and in English the practice

e dialogue between Tom and "Budge," at vol. i. p. 56, with the five-year-old cynicism of the elder's

Crabb Robinson was a much older acquaintance, and is credited, I believe, with the remark far earlier, that "he shouldn't dare to be intimate" with so clever a young man as Matthew Arnold. Very shortly before his death in February 1867, he had met Mr Arnold in the Athen?um, and asked "which of all my books I should myself name as the one that had got me my gre

I am, perhaps, no good judge, as I take little interest in the acted drama. It is much occupied with the inferiority of French poetry, and especially of the poetry of

s-are omitted, though the fine In Utrumque Paratus reappears for the first time as a consolation. As reprinted in 1877, this collection dropped The Church of Brou except the third part, and recovered not only Stagirius and others but The New Sirens, besides giving, for the first time in book-form, Haworth Churchyard, printed twenty-two years before in Fraser. A further reprint in 1881 restore

s in English, many of them by quite second-rate men; nothing to form the mind as reading really great authors forms