ABSTRACT
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 had become so associated with the sense of intellectual enjoyment that few readers wished them away. And for those of us who were privileged to know him (and few men were more widely known) the keen interest, the sometimes halfsmiling admiration of the general reader, was reinforced on its best and deepest side by our perception of his upright, manly, kindly soul. We saw that his manner was saved from any real arrogance by its tinge of self-mockery; that his playful superciliousness changed at once to grave attentive sympathy on any real appeal. And in his talk yet more strongly than in his books we felt the charm of that alert and open spirit, of that ready disinterested concern in almost every department of the thoughts and acts of men. 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. We must not, however, speak as though these various activities were scattered or separate things. Rather they formed stages in a life-long endeavor-the endeavor to diffuse, in his favorite words, ‘sweetness and light,’ by the application to our pressing problems of his own special gifts, namely the tact and flexibility which spring from culture, and the insight gained by a wide miscellaneous acquaintance with men and things. [Discusses Arnold’s public stature and his ‘religious attitudes’ for two pages] But on this [the religious] side, as on all sides of Matthew Arnold’s nature, he has given us, so to say, an esoteric interpretation, a power of appeal to his inmost self. For his poetry runs parallel to, but deeper than, all his lines of prose expression; it reflects his culture in its Greek and mediaeval tale and drama, his social energies in the ‘criticism of life’ which he judged to be the very function of poetry, and his religion in those melancholy stanzas in which his schemes of renewal, of conciliation, find no place, but which breathe with so pure a pathos the spirit of our unquiet age. And it is noteworthy that the poems are harmonious with themselves throughout. They belong mainly to his early life; but there is no marked difference of temper between the first utterances and the last. He told me
once that his official work, though it did not check his prose-writing, checked his poetry; but it may be doubted whether even with complete leisure the poems would have come with much freer flow. ‘The man mature,’ as he says himself in his Progress of Poesy (rather less in ‘the grand style’ than Gray’s)—
The man mature with labor chops For the bright stream a channel grand, And sees not that the sacred drops Ran off and vanished out of hand.
