Chapter 6 No.6

Conclusion.

The personal matters which usually, and more or less gracefully, fill the beginning of the end of a biography, are perhaps superfluous in the case of a man who died so recently, and who was so well known as Mr Matthew Arnold. Moreover, if given at all, they should be given by some one who knew him more intimately than did the present writer. He was of a singularly agreeable presence, without being in the sense of the painter's model exactly "handsome"; and in particular he could boast a very pleasant and not in the least artificial smile. 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 good-humouredly expostulating with me for overvaluing some French poet. I forget at the distance of seventeen or eighteen years who it was, but it was not Gautier. I replied in some such words as, "Well; perhaps he is not very important in himself, but I think he is 'important for us,' if I may borrow that." So he looked at me and said, "I didn't write that anywhere, did I?" And when I reminded him that he had told us how Sainte-Beuve said it of Lamartine, he declared that he had quite forgotten it. Which might, or might not, be Socratic.

But I should imagine that the complaints of his affectations in ordinary society were as much exaggerated as I am sure that the opposite complaints of the humdrum character of his letters are. Somebody talks of the "wicked charm" which a popular epithet or nickname possesses, and something of the sort seems to have hung about "The Apostle of Culture," "The Prophet of Sweetness and Light," and the rest. He only deserved his finical reputation inasmuch as he was unduly given to the use of these catch-words, not because he in any undue way affected to "look the part" or live up to them. And as for the letters, it must be remembered that he was a very busy man, with clerical work of the official kind enough to disgust a very Scriblerus; that he had, so far as the published letters show us, no very intimate friend, male or (still better) female, outside his own family; and further, that the degeneration of the art of letter-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 with a strength equal to knowledge, write with at least a sidelong glance at possible publication; some with a deliberate intention of it; all, I think, with a sort of unconscious consciousness of "how it will look" on paper. Of this in Mr Arnold's letters there is absolutely no sign. Even when he writes to comparative strangers, he never lays himself out for a "point" or a phrase, rarely even for a joke. To his family (and it should be remembered that the immense majority of the letters that we possess are family letters) he is naturally more familiar, but the familiarity does not bring with it any quips or gambols. Only in the very early letters, and chiefly in those to Wyndham Slade, is there any appearance of second thought, of "conceit," in the good sense. Later, he seems to have been too much absorbed in his three functions of official, critic, and poet to do more than shake hands by letter and talk without effort.

But if he, as the phrase is, "put himself out" little as to letter-writing, it was by no means the same in those other functions which have been just referred to. In later years (it is Mr Humphry Ward, I think, who is our sufficient authority for it) poetry was but occasional amusement and solace to him, prose his regular avocation from task-work; and there is abundant evidence that, willingly or unwillingly, he never allowed either to usurp the place of the vocation which he had accepted. Not everybody, perhaps, is so scrupulous. 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 conception of the relations of the hired labourer and the labour which gains him his hire. Not only does he seem to have performed his actual inspecting duties with that exact punctiliousness which in such cases is much better than zeal, but he did not grudge the expenditure of his art on the requirements, and not the strict requirements only, of his craft. The unfitness of poets for business has been often enough proved to be a mere fond thing vainly invented; but it was never better disproved than in this particular instance.

Of the manner in which he had discharged these duties, some idea may be formed from the volume of Reports which was edited, the year after his death, by Sir Francis Sandford. It would really be difficult to imagine a better display of that "sweet reasonableness," the frequency of which phrase on a man's lips does not invariably imply the presence of the corresponding thing in his conduct. It would be impossible for the most plodding inspector, who never dared commit a sonnet or an essay, to deal with his subject in a way showing better acquaintance with it, more interest in it, or more business-like abstinence 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 nowhere else (except in glimpses) provided by his extant work. It may even be doubted, by those who have read it, whether "cutting blocks with a razor" is such a Gothamite proceeding as it is sometimes held to be. For in this case the blocks are chopped as well as the homeliest bill-hook could do it; and we know that the razor was none the blunter. At any rate, the ethical document is one of the highest value, and very fit, indeed, to be recommended to the attention of young gentlemen of genius who think it the business of the State to provide for them, and not to require any dismal drudgery from them in return.

But the importance of Mr Arnold to English history and English literature has, of course, little or nothing to do with his official work. The faithful performance of that work 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 his performances as a man of letters. But it is as a man of letters, as a poet, as a critic, and perhaps most of all as both combined, that he ranks for history and for the world.

A detailed examination of his poetic performance has been attempted in the earlier pages of this little book, as well as some general remarks upon it; but we may well find room here for something more general still. That the poet is as much above the prose-writer in rank as he is admittedly 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, unless he thought he could write great prose and knew he could not write great poetry. But in another order of estimate than this, Mr Arnold's poetic work may seem of greater value than his prose, always admirable and sometimes consummate as the latter is, if we take each at its best.

At its best-and this is how, though he would himself seem to have sometimes felt inclined to dispute the fact, we must reckon a poet. His is not poetry of the absolutely trustworthy kind. It is not like that of Shelley or of Keats, who, when their period of mere juvenility is past, simply cannot help writing poetry; nor is it, on the other hand, like that of Wordsworth, who flies and flounders with an incalculable and apparently irresponsible alternation. It is rather-though I should rank it far higher, on all but the historic estimate, than Gray's-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 will not "indulge his genius." And so it is but rarely that we get things like the Scholar-Gipsy, like the Forsaken Merman, like the second Isolation; and when we do get such things there is sometimes, as in the case of the peroration to Sohrab and Rustum, and perhaps the splendid opening of Westminster Abbey and Thyrsis, a certain sense of parade, of the elaborate assumption of the singing-robe. There is too seldom the sensation which Coleridge unconsciously suggested in the poem that heralded the poetry of the nineteenth century. We do not feel that

"The fair breeze blew, the while foam flew,

The furrow followed free"-

that

"We were the first that ever burst

Into that silent sea;"

but that a mighty launch of elaborate preparation is taking place, that we are pleased and orderly spectators standing round, and that the ship is gliding in due manner, but with no rush or burst, into the sea of poetry. While elsewhere there may be even the sense of effort and preparation without the success.

But, once more, a poet is to be judged first by his best things, and secondly by a certain aura or atmosphere, by a nameless, intangible, but sensible quality, which, now nearer and fuller, now farther and fainter, is over his work throughout. In both respects Mr Arnold 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 they are or not. They sound the poetic note; they give the poetic flash and iridescence; they cause the poetic intoxication. Even in things not by any means of the best as wholes, you may follow that gleam safely. The exquisite revulsion of the undertone in Bacchanalia-

"Ah! so the silence was,

So was the hush;"

the honey-dropping trochees of the New Sirens; the description of the poet in Resignation; the outburst-

"What voices are these on the clear night air?"

of Tristram and Iseult; the melancholy meditation of A Summer Night and Dover Beach, with the plangent note so cunningly yet so easily accommodated to the general tone and motive of the piece,-these and a hundred other things fulfil all the requirements of the true poetic criticism, which only marks, and only asks for, the differentia of poetry.

And this poetic moment-this (if one may use the words, about another matter, of one who wrote no poetry, yet had more than all but three or four poets), this "exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the kiss of the spouse, and ingression into the divine shadow" which 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 minute, and it does happen at many minutes. This is what makes a poet: not the most judicious selection of subject, not the most studious contemplation and, as far as he manages it, representation of the grand style and the great masters. And this is what Mr Arnold has.

That his prose, admirable as it always is in form and invaluable as it often is in matter, is on the whole inferior to his verse, is by no means a common opinion, though it was expressed by some good judges both during his life and at the time of his death. As we have seen, both from a chance indication in his own letters and from Mr Humphry Ward's statement, he took very great pains with it; indeed, internal evidence would be sufficient to establish this if we had no positive external testimony whatsoever. He came at a fortunate time, when the stately yet not pompous or over-elaborated model of the latest Georgian prose, raised from early Georgian "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 on the passing of the Middle Ages and on the church-bell sound that memorises it. And Mr Froude was also free from the mannerisms, at times amounting to very distinct affectation, to which, in his middle period more especially, Mr Arnold succumbed. But he did not quite keep his friend's high level of distinction and tenue. It was almost impossible for Mr Arnold to be slipshod-I do not mean in the sense of the composition books, which is mostly an unimportant sense, but in one quite different; and he never, as Mr Froude sometimes did, contented himself with correct but ordinary writing. If his defect was mannerism, his quality was certain manner.

The most noticeable, the most easily imitated, and the most doubtful of his mannerisms was, of course, the famous iteration, which was probably at first natural, but which, as we see from the Letters, he afterwards deliberately fostered and accentuated, in order, as he thought, the better to get his new ideas into the heads of what the type-writer sometimes calls the "Brutish" public. That it became at times extremely teasing is beyond argument, and I should be rather afraid that Prince Posterity will be even more teased by it than we are, because to him the ideas it enforces will be, and will have been ever since he can remember, obvious and common-place enough. But when this and some other peccadillos (on which it is unnecessary to dwell, lest we imitate the composition-books aforesaid) were absent or even moderately present, sometimes even in spite of their intrusion, Mr Arnold'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 believe that posterity will trouble itself about the dreary apologetics of undogmatism on which he wasted so much precious time and energy; they will have been arranged by the Prince's governor on the shelves, with Hobbes's mathematics and Southey's political essays. "But the criticism," it will be said, "that ought to endure." No doubt from some points of view it ought, but will it? So long, or as soon, as English literature is intelligently taught in universities, it is sure of its place in any decently arranged course of Higher Rhetoric; so long, or as soon, as critics consider themselves bound to study the history and documents of their business, it will be read by them. But what hold does this give it? Certainly not a stronger hold than that of Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy, which, though some of us may know it by heart, can scarcely be said to be a commonly read classic.

The fact is-and no one knew this fact more thoroughly, or would have acknowledged it more frankly, than Mr Arnold himself-that criticism has, of all literature that is really literature, the most precarious existence. Each generation likes, and is hardly wrong in liking, to create for itself in this province, to which creation is so scornfully denied by some; and old critics are to all but experts (and apparently to some of them) as useless as old moons. Nor can one help regretting that so long a time has been lost in putting before the public a cheap, complete, handy, and fairly handsome edition of the whole of Mr Arnold's prose. There is no doubt at all that the existence 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 elegance, which has been vindicated for this, that we can afford to lay aside or to forget such consummate examples of it. Academic urbanity is not so universal a feature of our race-the constant endeavour at least to "live by the law of the peras," to observe lucidity, to shun exaggeration, is scarcely so endemic. Let it be added, too, that if not as the sole, yet as the chief, herald and champion of the new criticism, as a front-fighter in the revolutions of literary view which have distinguished the latter half of the nineteenth century in England, Mr Arnold will be forgotten or neglected at the peril of the generations and the individuals that forget or neglect him.

Little need be added about the loss of actual artistic pleasure which such neglect must bring. Mr Arnold may never, in prose, be read with quite the 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" moments, and sometimes even then, will carry off even the less agreeable matter; with matter at all agreeable, it has a hardly to be exaggerated charm.

But it is in his general literary position that Mr Arnold's strongest title to eminence consists. There have certainly been greater poets in English: I think there have been greater critics. But as poet and critic combined, no one but Dryden and Coleridge can be for a moment placed beside him: the fate of the false Florimel must await all others who dare that adventure. And if he must yield-yield by a long way-to Dryden in strength and easy command of whatsoever craft he tried, to Coleridge in depth and range and philosophical grasp, yet he has his revenges. Beside his delicacy and his cosmopolitan accomplishment, 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, but you cannot make," was confessedly impossible-a poet who knew not only the rule of thumb, but the rule of the uttermost art. In him the corruption of the poet had not been the generation of the critic, as his great predecessor in the two arts, himself secure and supreme in both, had scornfully said. Both faculties had always existed, and did always exist, side by side in him. He might exercise one more freely at one time, one at another; but the author of the Preface of 1853 was a critic, and a ripe one, in his heyday of poetry, the author of Westminster Abbey was a poet in his mellowest autumn of criticism.

And yet he was something more than both these things, more than both of these at once. But for that unlucky divagation in the Wilderness, his life would have been the life of a man of letters only as far as choice went, with the duties of no dishonourable profession superadded. And even with the divagation it was mainly and really this. To find parallels for Mr Arnold in his unflinching devotion to literature we must, I fear, go elsewhere than to Dryden or to Coleridge, we must go to Johnson and Southey. And here again we may find something in him beyond both, in that he had an even nobler conception of Literature than either. That he would have put her even too high, would have assigned to her functions which she is unable to discharge, is true enough; but this is at least no vulgar error. Against ignoble neglect, against stolid misunderstanding, 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 few-at successive times have done this for literature in England, and Mr Arnold was perhaps the last who did it notably in ours. One cannot imagine him writing merely for money, for position, even for fame-for anything but the devoir of the born and sworn servant of Apollo and Pallas. Such devotion need not, of course, forbid others of their servants to try his shield now and then with courteous arms or even at sharps-as he tried many. But it was so signal, so happy in its general results, so exactly what was required in and for England at the time, that recognition of it can never be frank enough, or cordial enough, or too much admiring. Whenever I think of Mr Arnold it is in those own words of his, which I have quoted already, and which I quoted to myself on the hill by Hinksey as I began this little book in the time of fritillaries-

"Still nursing the unconquerable hope,

Still clutching the inviolable shade"-

the hope and shade that never desert, even if they flit before and above, the servants and the lovers of the humaner literature.

Index.

* * *

Alaric at Rome, (4).

Bacchanalia, or the New Age, (114).

Balder Dead, (52), (53).

Byron, Poetry of, ed. Arnold, (185).

Celtic Literature, On the Study of, (66), (104) et seq.

Church of Brou, The, (38).

Consolation, (28).

Cromwell, (8), (9).

Culture and Anarchy, (128) et seq.

Discourses in America, (195).

Dover Beach, (112).

Empedocles on Etna, (23).

Essays in Criticism, (83) et seq., (123).

Eton, A French, (79) et seq.

Farewell, A, (27).

Forsaken Merman, The, (19).

French Eton, A, (79) et seq.

Friend, To a, sonnet, (15).

Friendship's Garland, (148).

God and the Bible, (137).

Heine's Grave, (115).

Homer, On Translating, (66).

In Utrumque Paratus, (20).

Irish Essays, (151).

Isolation, (31).

Johnson's Lives of the Poets, ed. Arnold, (169).

Last Essays on Church and Religion, (137), (142).

Letters, (1), (15) et seq., (214).

Lines written by a Death-bed, (32).

Literature and Dogma, (131) et seq.

Longing, (30).

Marguerite, To, (31).

Memorial Verses, (26).

Merman, The Forsaken, (19).

Merope, (60).

Mixed Essays, (168) et seq.

Modern Sappho, The, (17).

Mycerinus, (13).

New Sirens, The, (17).

Obermann, (53).

On the Rhine, (29).

On the Study of Celtic Literature, (66), (104) et seq.

On the Terrace at Berne, (16).

On Translating Homer, (66).

Preface, the, to the 'Poems' of 1853. (33) et seq.

Prose Passages, (166).

Renan, Arnold's relations with, (101).

Requiescat, (39).

Resignation, (20), (185).

Rugby Chapel, (115).

Sainte-Beuve, (59), (203).

Scholar-Gipsy, The, (5), (40) et seq.

Schools and Universities on the Continent, (116).

Selected Poems, (184).

Shairp, Principal, lines on Arnold by, (5).

Shakespeare, Sonnet to, (15).

Sick King in Bokhara, (15).

Sohrab and Rustum, (37), (51), (52).

Southey, use of rhymeless metre by, (11).

St Brandan, (111).

St Paul and Protestantism, (130) et seq.

Stagirius, (19).

Strayed Reveller, The, (10) et seq.

Summer Night, A, (26).

Switzerland, (16).

Tennyson, influence of, on Arnold, (19).

Thyrsis, (111).

To Fausta, (19).

To Marguerite, (31).

To my Friends who Ridiculed a Tender Leave-taking, (16), (27).

Tristram and Iseult, (24), (25).

Voice, The, (19).

Ward's English Poets, Arnold's Introduction to, (189).

Westminster Abbey, (207), (220), (228).

Wordsworth, Poems of, ed. Arnold, (185).

The End.

Printed by William Blackwood and Sons.

Footnote 1: Mr Arthur Galton's Matthew Arnold (London, 1897) adds a few pleasant notes, chiefly about dachshunds.

Footnote 2: It is impossible, in dealing with them, to be too grateful to Mr. T.B. Smart's Bibliography of Matthew Arnold (London, 1892), a most craftsmanlike piece of work.

Footnote 3: The editor glosses this variously spelt and etymologically puzzling word "landing-stage." But unless I mistake, a "kempshott," "campshed," or "campshedding" is not a landing-stage (though it helps to make one) so much as a river-wall of stakes and planks, put to guard the bank against floods, the wash of barges, &c.

Footnote 4: Glen Desseray and other Poems. By John Campbell Shairp, London, 1888. P. 218.

Footnote 5: This statement may seem too sweeping, especially as there is neither room nor occasion for justifying it fully. Let us only indicate, as among the heads of such a justification, the following sins of English criticism between 1840-1860,-the slow and reluctant acceptance even of Tennyson, 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 work of such combined intrinsic beauty and historic importance as The Defence of Guenevere and FitzGerald's Omar Khayyam. For a sort of quintessence of literary Philistinism, see the advice of Richard Ford (himself no Philistine) to George Borrow, in Professor Knapp's Life of the latter, i. 387.

Footnote 6: This "undertone," as Mr Shairp calls it.

Footnote 7: "What, then, are the situations, from the representation of which, though accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be derived? They are those in which the suffering finds no vent in action; 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 is inevitably something morbid, in the description of them something monotonous. When they occur in actual life, they are painful, not tragic; the representation of them in poetry is painful also."

Footnote 8: "The Tuxford waiter desponds exactly as you do."-Sydney Smith to Jeffrey.

Footnote 9: The mystery is partly explained, in a fashion of no little biographical importance, by the statement in Mr Arnold's first general report for the year 1852, that his district included Lincoln, Nottingham, Derby, Stafford, Salop, Hereford, Worcester, Warwick, Leicester, Rutland and Northants, Gloucester, Monmouth, all South Wales, most of North Wales, and some schools in the 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 Catholic schools remained till 1870. And it is impossible not to connect the somewhat exaggerated place which the Dissenters hold in his social and political theories (as well as perhaps some of his views about the "Philistine") with these associations of his. We must never forget that for nearly twenty years Mr Arnold worked in the shadow, not of Barchester Towers, but of Salem Chapel.

Footnote 10: "I have papers sent me to look over which will give me to the 20th of January in London without moving, then for a week to Huntingdonshire schools, then for another to London, ...and then Birmingham for a month."

Footnote 11: There are persons who would spell this moral; but I am not writing French, and in English the practice of good writers from Chesterfield downwards is my authority.

Footnote 12: The letters are full of pleasant child-worship, the best passage of all being perhaps the dialogue between Tom and "Budge," at vol. i. p. 56, with the five-year-old cynicism of the elder's reply, "Oh this is false Budge, this is all false!" to his infant brother's protestations of affection.

Footnote 13: Mr Disraeli's words (in 1864) have been referred to above (p. 100). They were actually: "At that time [when they had met at Lord Houghton's some seven or eight years earlier] ... you yourself were little known. Now you are well known. You have made a reputation, but you will go further yet. You have a great future before you, and you deserve it." 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 great reputation. I said I had not a great reputation, upon which he answered: 'Then it is some other Matthew Arnold who writes the books.'" The passage, which contains an odd prophecy of the speaker's own death, and an interesting indication that Mr Arnold rightly considered the Essays to be "the book that got him his reputation," will be found in Letters, i. 351.

Footnote 14: Of the remaining contents, the Prefaces of 1853-5 are invaluable, at least the first is, but this has been already noticed. Of The French Play in London, 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 Hugo; the inferiority of English civilisation, especially of the middle class. There are good things in it, but they are better said elsewhere. The rest needs no notice.

Footnote 15: A note on the contents of this and the subsequent collected editions may not be unwelcome; for, as was always the case with him, he varied them not a little. This first collection was advertised as comprehending "the First and Second Series of the Author's Poems and the New Poems," but as a matter of fact half-a-dozen pieces-including things as interesting as A Dream and Stagirius-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 restored the whole Church of Brou and A Dream, and gave two or three small additions, especially Geist's Grave. The three-volume edition of 1885 also republished Merope for the first time, and added Westminster Abbey and Poor Matthias. The one-volume edition of 1890 reproduced all this, adding Horatian Echo and Kaiser Dead; it is complete save for the two prize poems, and six or seven smaller pieces.

Footnote 16: "I do not like the course for the History School at all; nothing but read, read, read, endless histories in English, many of them by quite second-rate men; nothing to form the mind as reading really great authors forms it, or even to exercise it as learning a new language, or mathematics, or one of the natural sciences exercises it."