Matthew Arnold | Page 5

production was brought under
his notice, his judgment was clear, sympathetic, and independent. He
had the readiest appreciation of true excellence, a quick eye for minor
merits of facility and method, a severe intolerance of turgidity and
inflation--of what he called "desperate endeavours to render a platitude
endurable by making it pompous," and a lively horror of affectation and
unreality. These, in literature as in life, were in his eyes the
unpardonable sins.
On the whole it may be said that, as a critic of books, he had in his
lifetime the reputation, the vogue, which he deserved. But his criticism
in other fields has hardly been appreciated at its proper value. Certainly
his politics were rather fantastic. They were influenced by his father's
fiery but limited Liberalism, by the abstract speculation which
flourishes perennially at Oxford, and by the cultivated Whiggery which
he imbibed as Lord Lansdowne's Private Secretary; and the result often
seemed wayward and whimsical. Of this he was himself in some degree
aware. At any rate he knew perfectly that his politics were lightly
esteemed by politicians, and, half jokingly, half seriously, he used to

account for the fact by that jealousy of an outsider's interference, which
is natural to all professional men. Yet he had the keenest interest, not
only in the deeper problems of politics, but also in the routine and
mechanism of the business. He enjoyed a good debate, liked political
society, and was interested in the personalities, the trivialities, the
individual and domestic ins-and-outs, which make so large a part of
political conversation.
But, after all, Politics, in the technical sense, did not afford a suitable
field for his peculiar gifts. It was when he came to the criticism of
national life that the hand of the master was felt. In all questions
affecting national character and tendency, the development of
civilization, public manners, morals, habits, idiosyncrasies, the
influence of institutions, of education, of literature, his insight was
penetrating, his point of view perfectly original, and his judgment, if
not always sound, invariably suggestive. These qualities, among others,
gave to such books as Essays in Criticism, Friendship's Garland, and
Culture and Anarchy, an interest and a value quite independent of their
literary merit. And they are displayed in their most serious and
deliberate form, dissociated from all mere fun and vivacity, in his
Discourses in America. This, he told the present writer, was the book
by which, of all his prose-writings, he most desired to be remembered.
It was a curious and memorable choice.
Another point of great importance in his prosewriting is this; if he had
never written prose the world would never have known him as a
humorist. And that would have been an intellectual loss not easily
estimated. How pure, how delicate, yet how natural and spontaneous
his humour was, his friends and associates knew well; and--what is by
no means always the case--the humour of his writing was of exactly the
same tone and quality as the humour of his conversation. It lost nothing
in the process of transplantation. As he himself was fond of saying, he
was not a popular writer, and he was never less popular than in his
humorous vein. In his fun there is no grinning through a horse-collar,
no standing on one's head, none of the guffaws, and antics, and
"full-bodied gaiety of our English Cider-Cellar." But there is a keen eye
for subtle absurdity, a glance which unveils affectation and penetrates

bombast, the most delicate sense of incongruity, the liveliest disrelish
for all the moral and intellectual qualities which constitute the Bore,
and a vein of personal raillery as refined as it is pungent. Sydney Smith
spoke of Sir James Mackintosh as "abating and dissolving pompous
gentlemen with the most successful ridicule." The words not inaptly
describe Arnold's method of handling personal and literary
pretentiousness.
His praise as a phrase-maker is in all the Churches of literature. It was
his skill in this respect which elicited the liveliest compliments from a
transcendent performer in the same field. In 1881 he wrote to his sister:
"On Friday night I had a long talk with Lord Beaconsfield. He ended by
declaring that I was the only living Englishman who had become a
classic in his own lifetime. The fact is that what I have done in
establishing a number of current phrases, such as Philistinism,
Sweetness and Light, and all that is just the thing to strike him." In 1884
he wrote from America about his phrase, The Remnant--"That term is
going the round of the United States, and I understand what Dizzy
meant when he said that I had performed 'a great achievement in
launching phrases.'" But his wise epigrams and compendious sentences
about books and life, admirable in themselves, will hardly recall the
true