ARNOLD CHAPTER I CHARACTER AND CAREER "The aimless and unsettled, but also open and liberal state of our youth we must perhaps all leave and take refuge in our morality and character; but with most of us it is a melancholy passage from which we emerge shorn of so many beams that we are almost tempted to quarrel with the law of nature which imposes it on us."-Letters, I, 17. ATTHEW ARNOLD is a charming but not an altogether conciliatory writer. If you disagree with him, he does not encourage you to believe that you may be in the right. When he was a middle-aged man, his favorite sister said to him. that he was "becoming as dogmatic as Ruskin.” “I told her," writes Arnold, good-humoredly reporting the incident to his mother, "the difference was that Ruskin was 'dogmatic and wrong.'" This is in the true critical temper-gentle but firm and just a little provocative! In this temper Arnold worked at the main task of his life: making aristocratic tastes prevail in a 1 world which was becoming rapidly democratic. Radical democrats, bent on extolling middle-class virtues, and popular orators who go about persuading the people that the fruits of culture are green grapes sought, and still seek, to thrust him aside as a “high priest of the kid glove persuasion." But he, in his fashion, was as worldly, as positive, as aggressive, and as progressive as his adversaries. He was better rooted in the past than they, and he intended to go with them into the future. He had wit to win attention, and clearness to profit by it. He held and extended his ground by pertinacity and versatility in attack. Where he did not gain assent he ultimately commanded the respect due to a distinguished, sincere, weighty, and thoroughly organized character. In an unsettled epoch of English thought he found a central position, and sharply defined his attitude toward the important movements in literature, education, society, politics and religion. He said something pertinent and stimulating or irritating about everybody's business; so that he remains, for all his air of exclusive refinement, one of the unavoidable writers of the nineteenth century, one of the reconstructive forces in the twentieth.1 Various as are his themes, his work as a whole is a remarkably harmonious and symmetrical 1 Interesting tribute is paid by H. G. Wells in Mr. Britling Sees It Through, N. Y., 1916; see pages 256 and 289, where England's difficulties in the European war are attributed to the fact that "we didn't listen to Matthew Arnold." expression of "general ideas" which will appeal to what he liked in later life to call "the body of quiet, reasonable people" in every age. Whether in the end one accepts or rejects him, he is a suggestive guide to a man who is trying to discover what he ought to think on most subjects which concern him. Behind the impeccable front of Arnold's prose works there was a human being with human frailties, who attained his definiteness of outline and finish of surface by processes which are a legitimate subject of our interest. But it is not easy to recover what he discarded when he cut and polished and set his character. Not wishing to amuse posterity with his private affairs, he forbade a formal biography. His published letters, from which too intimate and too piquant matters have been removed, begin in his late twenties when the first ferment of youth was over, and he was already reflecting that we can "only acquire any solidity of shape and power of acting by narrowing and narrowing our sphere, and diminishing the number of affections and interests which continually distract us while young, and hold us unfixed and without energy to mark our place in the world." One of the rare glimpses of his impressionable early manhood he gives us in “The French Play in London": "I remember how in my youth, after a first sight of the divine Rachel at the Edinburgh Theatre, in the part of Hermione, I followed her to Paris, and for two months never missed |